


Lead Me Gently Home

by bluesyturtle



Series: Flesh and Blood [3]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Angels & Demons, Ancient History, Animal Attack, Canonical Character Death, Child Death, Consent Issues, Courtship, Dead Languages, Demon Hannibal Lecter, Demonic Possession, Empathy, F/M, Fallen Angel Will Graham, Fictional Religion & Theology, First Kiss, First Meetings, First Time, Flashbacks, Flirting, Genderfluid Character, Historical, Human Sacrifice, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Inspired by Music, Languages and Linguistics, M/M, Manipulation, Memory Alteration, Murder, Mythology - Freeform, POV Multiple, Pagan Gods, Past Lives, Possession, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Relationship, Pre-Slash, Reincarnation, Religion, Stabbing, Supernatural Elements, Time Skips, True Forms, Violence, Wing Kink
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-07
Updated: 2015-07-18
Packaged: 2018-02-16 11:12:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 7
Words: 56,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2267556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluesyturtle/pseuds/bluesyturtle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will Graham learns to accept mortality and human life, but his past sins (and long-ago lover) are hungry to catch up with him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Oh, What a Dream

**Author's Note:**

  * For [darkenergies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkenergies/gifts).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first time is always special.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _I tried the angel for a kiss / Oh, what a dream / But she turned away and my lips missed / Oh, what a dream / She said, “Sir, I’ll have you know / I met you just a while ago.”_

After a particularly exciting meeting of the minds in Teotlachco with city officials, Ose goes running through the tiyānquiztli wearing the face and garb of a maiden. The men turn their heads when he passes and the children laugh and run after him.

It’s harmless when it happens like this, and it does quite often.

There’s some excitement farther down in the valleys from which Ose keeps his distance. He hears something about an outsider who’s come out of Lake Xochimilco like a gift from the water goddess Chalchiuhtlicue. At first he suspects someone has only attempted to drown himself in the lake, but even then, it would be worth his time to look.

He runs toward the lake’s edge and stands on the muddy bank where the chinampas run in neat, precise rows parallel to the water. Over its shimmering surface there are only traces of ripples where motion once gripped it. The people have settled down since they found the one who emerged however long ago. Ose must have been at the temple still when it happened. The people he asks speak of sacrificing the stranger. Ose finds it hilarious.

Or he does, until he traipses back into the city and gets eyes on the man. He’s obviously an outsider—skin like a European and eyes the smudged azure of Xiuhtecuhtli’s mask. Ose gets an eyeful before venturing closer.

It’s unnecessary to move at all, but he wants to be near to that strangely unique being that is so stunningly different. He thinks of the long glinting sea when he studies that face with its high smooth forehead and flushed cheeks. A single errant curl twists over shiny, unembellished skin. Ose gives the outsider a day before freckles break out over that fair, otherworldly flesh. That’s only if the locals decide not to sacrifice him after all, which Ose only halfheartedly hopes they won’t. It would be a waste of a perfectly aesthetic physical form.

Amidst the throngs of people, Ose can approach without drawing attention to himself. He gets just close enough to see the man’s pupils dilate when he happens to look up straight at him—encouraging. Sexual attraction makes people so much easier to manipulate.

Ose takes one step closer, and that’s when he feels the harsh, urgent jolt of an angelic aura filling the air between them. He freezes. All the energy filling him poised to _escape escape escape escape_. His limbs lock together and his pulse quivers. The _host’s_ limbs, the _host’s_ pulse.

The man stands and Ose belatedly hides the natural shadows of his face. He closes his eyes and runs as fast as he can, lurching into and out of bodies to get to safety. He hasn’t had to move this quickly since he fled from the Picts at Alba. What a ride that had been, and yet nothing at all like this fervent, panicked running. He’s afraid to be captured, driven by fear that is too deeply ingrained in survival for him to even contemplate trying anything else.

Only after he’s mastered the hill and returned to the city where great swells of people fill the streets does he allow himself to relax. Finally confident that his true face is hidden from view and that the angel is nowhere to be seen, he leaves the city for the trees on the other side of Lake Texcoco.

Ose wears a man called Huitzilli for the remainder of the long dragging afternoon and unfurls into a pitahaya tree near the water to experience the encroaching sunset. Weary disbelief settles into the spaces around and within him, filling up the green rubbery leaves, the lush, white flowers spilling out from them, and the succulent red fruits heavy with the bounty of nature and endurance.

The white opened flowers that have become his hands react to the retreating sun and rescind their vulnerable yellow faces, soft and pollinated all day long by eager bees. He watches the luminous tlilxochitl sway in the sedate evening breeze, unaware and unafraid of the locals who will pluck and grind her sweet-scented seeds. She bloomed this morning, and tonight she will close forever.

The best kind of flower is a dramatic one after all. Ose smiles with his borrowed leaves, leaning minutely into the soft crush of dying light. The sun retreats over a distant horizon. As the last wisps of sun clear his small, temporary piece of the universe, the black flower called tlilxochitl closes her decadent petals to the extinguished day.

In the aftermath of this brief spectacle of nature, he’s tempted to leave his quiet alcove in the pitahaya’s clumsy green shelter. It’s the knowledge that keeps him planted right where he is—knowledge of what it is that’s come for him and what it means for his life that it has finally come to pass as he was told it was.

Whispers have been trailing after him since Ravenna where Death had found the great poet Dante and only just missed Ose himself. Angels. Mindless pests. Better off dead than avoided. This one can be no different.

As far as he knows the chase started in Italy, though he hadn’t needed to run in earnest until he’d come to Tenochtitlan. Up until then he had been haunted rather than pursued outright. Maybe that is just his due, to be the hunted after roaming for so many easy years as the hunter. Nearly the entire puzzle had come together the minute he set foot in Templo Mayor. It was then that he could feel it driving under stolen flesh and shocking his naked essence with primal apprehension. 

He had heard it grumbled in prophecy among patesis for years after Ravenna. They found him almost in the manner of serial accidents, but it is never unintentional with the patesis—the seers of heaven, hell, and the ruddy earth.

They had looked to him with their dazed eyes and casually polluted his mind with fragments of a future ever-changing. No one had come for him in the time it took him to escape the seas and continents in which he had encountered them, but the dread that someone _would_ come never left him.

The patesis prophesy in three parts: the first is what must be, the second is what can be, and the last is what shapes the journey itself. The divination itself spans fate, its obstacle, and free will.

 _One will come to you, Ose, and he will be the end of you,_ the first had said.

A full year later when he had dropped his guard entirely and forgotten of the ominous oracle, the second patesi found him in Barcelona boarding a ship. He’d said, _You have it in you to survive him._

The third had found him at the Gila River with the Hohokam people, born into that life where they would meet as one who would bear lovely, healthy children. An infant clutched at her breast and she had smiled at him, eyes jaded and mouth soft. Her words stayed with him like sickness, deliberate and slowly, unassumingly powerful: _It would be more beautiful to love him first._

Leave it to the patesis to strike more fear into his heart for predicting love than for predicting death. He had always prided himself on avoiding prolonged contact with Others like him—those who were beyond the earthly realm in one way or another. But here they had stalked him for a period of years and promised him a partner in every sense of the word.

He would like to be surprised that his end will come at the hands of a dumu Aĝ with the grace of heaven evident in his rose-tinted complexion. Part of him is, a little bit. A greater part of him is braced and thirsting for hell.

It had to have been one like them, not a human but someone greater…someone to test him and threaten him with the quick, ecstatic pain of a lasting death; better dumu Aĝ than one of his own kind. Ose is young still, for Aḫḫāzu. His time won’t be up for many years to come.

Still, the _simplicity_ of it grates on his nerves. Heaven’s servants and hell’s escape artists have fought long enough for the continued conflict to register in his mind as terribly trite. 

Somewhere in the durable thread of temporality a saint or otherwise untouchable being is laughing at him. He was so prepared to forget all about prophecy. Of course, now here he sits in Tenochtitlan, holed up in a pitahaya tree like he has nowhere else to be.

If his destiny is stomping around somewhere in the city, then he sure as _hell_ doesn’t.

But when the night recedes and the pitahaya flowers loosen their petals at the first touches of dawn, he relinquishes the safety he’s carved out of the tree. The sun rises over the rest of his life like chains coming down to bind him.

A partner and captor has come for him, just as has been foretold. He could kill himself. Better yet, he could slaughter the Nahuatl and raze Tenochtitlan for having the audacity to agree with exhortation. It’s been a good long while since the last massacre he instigated, disregarding those that were smaller installments in larger wars and not his doing. 

There was also the time he stole with the Vikings…

Damn it all. He’s fond of this land. He likes its beasts and the things that crawl and those that soar and the flowers that open and those that can’t ever again. It is permanence and ephemerality and a lush paradise and a vicious trap. It is all things, and if the beginning of the end is to be here amid the green jungle and the cries of unbound birds, then perhaps he can accept it with some of the grace owed to the place.

_One will come to me, they said, and so one has._

Ose shouldn’t have to walk far until they meet again. He’s walked far enough already.

Simple idiot that he is, Huitzilli doesn’t return to the wilds when Ose needs him. Instead he happens upon a woman of stunning brown eyes and charmingly crooked teeth fetching water from the spring. It’s unnecessary with the city’s use of the Chapultepec aqueduct, but her feet had been restless for an adventure, however small.

There isn’t a crude or unkind thought tumbling about in her mind when he overtakes her. She lets him in even as she acknowledges that it is a possession. She thinks he is a god. In some circles, she’s right.

He doesn’t care to linger with her for long. He’s lived a relaxed existence up until this point because of his fluidity, which is now the thing that has gotten him into trouble. Experience hadn’t taught him the necessity of concealing the face he wore with him on his ascent from hell. Now the angel knows where in Nahuatl he is and what he truly looks like.

For all his caution, Ose knows he is the best at crafty evasion. He _knows_ he’s the best—knows that when people mention his name, his many talents often trail after.

It’s why he can stomach a fourth successive body with little more than a slight migraine splitting right between the host’s eyebrows. The effort isn’t strenuous, but it does ache. Aḫḫāzu are built to transfer consciousness but more out of a protective instinct—the drive to flee from an incomparable threat, to name one of a scarce few.

Only a handful of times now has he found himself unable to clear his head enough to escape a body in time to avoid the slow grind of physical death stinging him. Most of their kind can’t escape by that point. In this respect he is the best. No one emulates the nature of smoke quite like Ose does. Smoke is his medium. It is the force of his being.

He can at least appreciate the joke inherent in _that_ : his nature blackened by fire and the angel’s bathed indelibly in light.

Ose purchases mizquitl pods from a merchant and changes bodies with him upon payment. He chews contemptuously on a pale strip of the stuff as his former host ambles off, confused but cheerful for the mizquitl he wouldn’t have bought himself if Ose hadn’t pushed him to it. He stands watch in the tiyānquiztli for an hour before the expected guest comes to him, empty-handed but for a single burning question. 

God has such a fantastic sense of humor when He tries. Really, He does.

The unsuspecting being that approaches him emanates goodwill and deceptive benignancy. His features are European, displaced among the Nahuatl.

And that, of course, is not to mention the other thing—the thing that makes him _Other_ like Ose. The not-man smiling modestly with gentle hands and humbled posture is the same dumu Aĝ from before, incapable of changing his form like Ose can.

Ose stares openly at the angel God sent to be his downfall. It is this being with whom Ose could fall in so many more ways than just the one. Conversely, Ose knows of all the various ways he could make the angel fall and can only guess at the best ways to make them happen.

“Is there a tannery near here?” the stranger asks in the language of the people with a seamless accent.

Ose tugs on his host’s knowledge and directs him outside the city walls, explaining, “The practice yields an unpleasant odor.”

“I’ve heard. Do you know,” he asks, leaning in confidentially, teeth gleaming, “if your tanner deals in ocelot hides?”

“Tlatlocelotl,” Ose repeats like the word confuses him. “They are bred for sacrifice here. You will find someone to sell to you.”

He only just refrains from pointing out the irony that the people had wanted to sacrifice _him_ just yesterday.

“What about in the wild?” the outsider masquerading as a peaceful visitor asks.

“For hunting?”

The longer they stand here, the more Ose can feel his soft interior trembling with the instinct to flee. As long as they are engaged, though, he must stay where he is. Running now would be the same as surrendering his position, _again_. It can’t be that the man holding him captive has any inkling as to what Ose is, though he must be here looking for some clue as to where he has hidden himself. After all, his sole purpose in Tenochtitlan is to find him just as Ose’s is to be found by him.

“I want to see one in the flesh more than anything.”

Ose feels himself smiling through his host, fighting against onslaughts of tremors not to show his face for even a fraction of a second. “Do you?”

“I’ve heard they’re spectacular creatures.”

“Territorial,” Ose murmurs indifferently, not saying what he wants to—that they mark obsessively and contribute a worse stench than that of the tannery itself.

The man is the very image of an unthreatening, but infinitely capable predator. It’s in his smile when he asks, “Have you seen any? Ocelots or jaguars?” He flicks his gaze away and then back, and Ose’s spine _vibrates_ with the need to escape this small portion of his unalterable destiny. “Maybe a leopard?”

_Oh._

“A leopard?”

If Ose bore a shred of doubt that this man carried the outcome of his life on his shoulders, he doesn’t after that question. The mizquitl pod crumbles in his hand.

“Yes, a leopard. Are you all right?”

“Far from town the wilderness is vast. A man could find anything he set his soul after.”

The statement—or its phrasing, perhaps—wins him a smile, and it’s a beautiful one full of perfectly aligned teeth and pink, curved lips.

_It would be more beautiful to love him first._

“I’m sure Tezcatlipoca had a similar thought when he became the sun, right up until Quetzalcoatl struck him down.”

“Even gods fall,” Ose answers, desperation seeping into the living skin that holds him.

But if the patesis had predicted love, doesn’t that mean he has a choice—least of all a chance? It can’t be reduced to stilted bursts of interaction. Ose is protected by prophecy just as much as he is damned by it. He is prepared to leap out of this shivering body and put as much distance between himself and the unnatural man as he possibly can when that smiling mouth flickers into a frown. The prospect of falling frightens him, then.

Ose wonders, grinding the mizquitl between his fingers, what his intended champion would do if Ose were to show his face right here and now. He can’t guess with any measure of accuracy whether he would tear up the tiyānquiztli in pursuit of him or if he would let him go and change his strategy for the next time they happen upon each other.

 _Why shouldn’t it be **my** strategy?_ Ose thinks dourly, releasing the crushed pod and allowing the fractured pieces to cling to skin not his own.

_It **will** be my strategy. _

“And angels fall, too, sweet one.”

The look that befalls that fair, handsome face will bring Ose joy until the day he dies. Those dark eyebrows pulling together in short-lived confusion pair delectably with the slack lower lip, glistening supply in the sun as if he’s just licked it.

For now Ose can run, and so he does, dissolving from body to body and creating a veritable thunderstorm in his wake just as Tezcatlipoca himself had when he destroyed the world in his impudent rage. He doesn’t look back until he reaches the fringes of the city.

When he does stop to catch his breath, all he sees behind him is the clear, silent expanse of trees, laughing blue sky, and faint trails of pollen, mist, and smoke. This land will be sacred to him for all of time, whether he is killed here or whether he leaves it never to return again.

It burrows deep into the well of memory that is more than consciousness but less than the essence itself. No matter where he goes, he’ll keep this precious blue jewel of illuminated universe, its drugged, patient sunsets, the crowded, bustling tiyānquiztli where he left the One of the blue eyes and the too-trusting smile.

Ose hopes it will point toward _him_ one day and not just to the person he wears, but until he can rationally expect that reaction, he will mollify himself with stolen glimpses and unannounced touches. He takes many, most of which the angel tracking him never thinks to acknowledge until Ose has long since gotten away. It’s a tantalizing game, and a dangerous one. Ose’s never provoked a dumu Aĝ this openly; he’s never blatantly asked for trouble, nor has he ever once enjoyed its casual danger so thoroughly.

He doesn’t even know this angel’s name, though the presence he drags with him is familiar enough not to feel completely foreign at its most basic level. They must have crossed paths before—really, it could have been anywhere. Angels are used so frivolously when their heavenly Dispatcher makes up His mind about something.

Apparently He got bored sitting up on His cloud and decided to make a project of Ose. What better way to amuse himself than to send someone so adorably naïve after someone so cunningly ruthless?

Ose can see the logic when he takes his time with it. Anyone else—anyone with that touch of militant obedience that angels are so often built to have—Ose would have ripped apart immediately. Dumu Aĝ are dangerous on any plane wherein one might find them, but Ose isn’t praised for his great feats of physical strength or combat skills or even his intelligence. Ose is revered for the weapon of his mind. He wields insanity like no one on the face of the planet or even beneath it.

He needed someone that would fascinate him, and this clumsy, seemingly well-meaning angel appears to be lacking in any capacity to wring the life out of Ose with his hands as any other soldier of God might attempt to do. If that’s the case, then his weapon is mental just like Ose’s is mental. 

Ose chases the unnamed One for days that stretch into weeks, and then he watches him from afar. It’s the purest kind of delight to watch him wander through the city with eyes that look more and more tired and a slouch to his shoulders that is pleasantly defeated. He has no way of knowing where to search for Ose if he cannot see him and if Ose leaves no trace of where he has been.

The game isn’t as fun when his hand is so much better, so he eases after a month of distance, reasoning that another conversation can’t be too challenging. It only struck him the first time because he’d never dealt with an angel that could still call heaven home.

Their brand of energy stifles in the same way he thinks his own must agitate a human when he slips inside of their flesh. It gives him an edge that the angel seeking him out cannot hope to usurp without finding a way to disarm Ose first—and if he can’t get eyes on him, there can be no disarmament. Ose acts accordingly, and gives the angel more to go off of.

He locks eyes with him across distances too far to close in the span of time that he needs to get away and dares to tease out something greater than stolen looks and clever taunts and exhilarating chases. The angel is reluctant to trust him and even warier of his interest in him—veiled as Ose is in the guise of a woman. It goes on. In between meetings, Ose shows himself elsewhere in town so as to seem present in all places but in the yurt of the woman whose face he uses most often.

After one such disguised conversation about none other than Mictlantecuhtli and Quetzalcoatl in the woman’s close, intimate quarters, he’s spotted and quickly detained. Ose thrills in how those fingers close with astonishing aggression over the tops of his thin, feminine arms. It is a pilfered touch and lasts only a few seconds before he shakes out of that skin and into another and into another…

Ose couldn’t do it if he weren’t relaxed, but the more they run circles around each other the easier it gets. Ose trains himself to tolerate that buzzing aura that sits on the angel’s being. Like anything else, it takes practice.

In the beginning it’s indefinably difficult. Even once he acclimates, it is a strain not to at least flicker in the face of that brilliant, unforgiving heat that is more than light but less than fire. He thinks to ask someday if that’s what heaven feels like—shy of hell for its lack of flames but greater than the earth for its sun.

It’s a beautiful intermingling of all things. Ose yearns to study it and to hold it in his hands. He _desires_.

And there it is: free will staring him in the face. His right to choose. Submitting to an obsession is hardly a choice, but he wants it more than anything else he’s ever been blessed or cursed enough to have. 

The seasons shift with the winds, speeding the heat behind them as the earth eases into hibernation. Ose can’t stay away, least of all when the snows come. That treasured, uninterrupted pulse radiating off _his_ dumu Aĝ becomes intoxicating in the cold.

It doesn’t bother him anymore to call the angel his. For what does he exist on this plane if not Ose?

“You _are_ meant to kill me, aren’t you?” Ose asks him outside the Templo Mayor when the sun is only beginning to break over the buildings in bloody, languid streaks. “Or is it your strategy to seem totally harmless?”

The angel assigned to kill and enliven him in one fell blow scoffs. “Is it yours?”

Ose draws nearer at that and then stops short, remembering just in time to exercise caution no matter how badly he would like to explore that body that has been tailored to fit his conception of physical beauty—and it must have been, undoubtedly. All angels molded into flesh are built as they are in order to suit one intrinsic purpose, and their game is one of seduction.

“Have I failed to live up to my reputation?” Ose asks him, recalling the Papago-Pima he used in Arizona with the Hohokam. 

For a moment the angel scrutinizes him, gaze tripping down to study the shapes Ose makes with his lips around the words he doesn’t seem to know. In Nahuatl, he asks, “One more time?”

Ose repeats the question and utterly fails to conceal his pleasure at the grammatically flawed but syntactically interpretable response: “I’m not convinced you have any sway over matters of sanity and insanity.”

“Are you asking for a demonstration?”

He does believe what he’s heard, though, if the slight widening of his eyes is any judge of his heart. Ose likes that concern. He’s spent his life earning it.

“What is your name?” Ose can’t help but ask. He _can’t_. He must know it.

Switching back to Nahuatl, which sounds far more effortless on his tongue, his destined adversary in everything says, “I shouldn’t tell you.”

“Will you?”

He looks away. The risen sun captures his profile in all the ways that he should be capturing Ose. “It will make this worse.”

“Isn’t it already dreadful?”

“It will be _worse_.”

Ose can’t guess at what that means, but deep beneath the borrowed, thrumming bones, he feels himself shaking. Some part of him _does_ know already.

It is part of the prophecy told by the patesis that love could grow between them. Therefore, that brand of knowing and of being known is not lost to Ose. He can have it. It is a stitch in the greater fabric of his fate that he only has to claim and that his partner and eventual killer need only accept.

How very poetic that he would cling to destiny now, right as he finds himself ensconced in its honey trap. He isn’t alone in that respect. The One who will not name himself keeps his eyes on the red sun climbing toward his home in heaven. Ose can feel traces of that home when he steps in closer and lets the familiar comfort of that whirring, sparking aura douse him. It reacts to him like he is an obstruction meant to be consumed and obliterated.

It wouldn’t be the most unfortunate of ways to go. Certainly, it wouldn’t.

“You’ve answered none of my questions,” Ose remarks, stunned and jubilant and unbalanced—disarmed.

His angel smiles, wholly at peace but conflicted. “You aren’t the devil I was promised.”

It should be an insult, but instead Ose is proud. In the grander scheme of this courtship he has won this one admission that rings so much like acquiescence.

“What do you look like apart from this skin?”

Ose finds himself turning away from the sun to give his dual-functioning slave and master a blank look. “I’ve been told I look vaguely feline.”

“So there is something to the myth after all.”

“I broke the shell of this earth as a leopard with the embers of hell burning at my back. It is not a myth.”

They stand there in the brightening morning, each of them swathed in coats that are too warm when paired with the steady beat of energy that guards the angel’s earthly body. The hands attached to that heat rub together and then disappear into the opened slits of his coat. “Neither will this be a myth.”

“Tell me your name,” Ose entreats, “please.”

A slow intake of breath, an unsteady exhale, one more glance away. “Mal’ak ha-mashḥit.”

He leaves Ose standing before the illuminated Templo Mayor. For the first time in their drawn out pursuit of each other, Ose is not the one to run from this thing they have cultivated. He feels like he would have stood there all morning and through the day until night fell and broke with the unstoppable dawn if Mal’ak had only let him.

Lazily, with the motivation of one who does not wish to discover something but must because the fact is unavoidable, he realizes who it is that has been sent after him. Mal’ak ha-mashḥit is none other than the Destroyer Angel himself.

Ose felt the first touch of Mal’ak in Ravenna where Dante died. It’s why he felt the stamp of impermanence on his life ever since he left Italy. Everything _had_ started there. His path had converged, even if only peripherally, with that of Mal’ak for just a moment in their separate eternities. Nothing less than forever had been owed to them before they were bonded together. Individually they could have lived until the end of time, but joined, their days were numbered.

God must have felt the spark of creative genius when He saw the two of them foisted together for the first time, so near yet worlds apart still. No doubt Ose has had innumerable run-ins with the _Angel of Death_ prior to Tenochtitlan and even Ravenna, but it _was_ Italy that hewed their diverging roads into one wide lane.

It could have been as simple as Dante’s writings when Ose found him and clung to his side until his last dying days. He’d penned _Paradiso_ with a devil at his side—one who loved him for what he’d made of hell in _Inferno_.

No one can resist tug of humor, apparently. Not even God is impervious to a good joke.

After learning the name Mal’ak ha-mashḥit, Ose is more careful than ever not to get within strangling distance. He’d speculated before that the powers Mal’ak hid from him were sure to be mental more than physical, and he believes it now more than he did in the beginning. He may not be able to track Ose through a crowd of people or physically chase him down on foot, but a greater strength must rest beneath the calm, worn surface of him.

When the first hints of vernal warmth bleed into the air Ose returns to Mal’ak as the woman from yurt. They meet by Lake Texcoco where the pitahaya and tlilxochitl have begun to grow anew within view of the green-blue waters.

He flashes red through the woman’s eyes, favoring a smaller show of his identity than bearing his whole visage as any other demon could and will with the passing of time. Only Ose and Mal’ak will recognize the gesture. It will be theirs always.

“That’s the same woman you wore when I first came here,” Mal’ak tells him. The succulence of sin clings to his confession, and Ose would drop to his knees and beg to hear him speak that way for the rest of his limited but sprawling existence. “I didn’t recognize her at first. When I saw you all I could remember was your face.”

“Mine?”

“Whispers and fire.” Mal’ak looks away, directing his gaze to a spot far beyond the water. “It made me wonder what I would look like if I hadn’t been fitted into this skin.”

“Do you wonder how different you would appear, or if you would look similar?”

“I wonder if I would be as fearsome as you.”

Ose smiles pleasantly at what he perceives to be a compliment. “Your like is impossible to see with mortal eyes. Fear could not measure you.”

“And yet the form that mortals can see isn’t for them, is it?” Mal’ak frowns in the direction of the water as the sun colors the horizon behind them and slowly unravels night’s darkness.

“You say that as if it’s my fault.”

Mal’ak tilts his head back to watch the purpling sky above. “No more than it is my own.”

Ose watches him—this creature that could move him to destroy the earth but who would rather destroy the earth resisting him. “I don’t think we could have stopped it.” He sees Mal’ak formulating an argument and revises his statement before the rebuff comes: “Neither of us could stomach the alternative.”

“You don’t know the things I’ve done.”

“And you know what I have done?”

Mal’ak swallows hard and gives Ose a burning look. Yes, that’s about right. If they aren’t already, they will burn soon. Ose, for one, is burning now. He _burns_.

“I know remarkably little about what you’ve done,” he admits quietly, returning his gaze to the water where Ose can’t pin him with incandescent red eyes. “We aren’t omniscient.”

“You know of my leopard, of my craft.”

“Stories,” Mal’ak murmurs. “Legends.”

“Of which you will be a part,” Ose murmurs back, sidling in closer but still out of arm’s reach. “They will call you the giant of my cosmos.”

“They’ll call _you_ my downfall.”

Ose grins, leaning in with his stolen body and plummeting with much more than that. “You haven’t fallen yet.”

He’ll treasure this expression, too—this longsuffering, mildly irritated frown that disapproves of so much. Mal’ak grumbles, “Haven’t I?”

“Have you?”

He receives no answer, so Ose does what he should never do and steps into that heated, humming barrier Mal’ak wears like armor but that teases Ose’s senses like peyotl. The heart fueling his body races and beats in his throat. This craving for what he absolutely cannot have makes him feel so much like a child.

Braving the risk of incredible pain, Ose leans in and presses a kiss to the point of one flushed, yielding cheekbone. A surprise collision rifles through him, sucking the breath out of his lungs and coloring his face with a winded smile. It should feel like a betrayal, but it’s far too beautiful to sting him as such. Ose stays put and licks his lips where Mal’ak will feel it. Neither of them moves. Mal’ak continues to stare out over the water.

“It’ll end this way,” he whispers.

Ose brushes his lips along a smooth, warm hairline. “Can you see so far ahead?”

“I wish I didn’t see anything.”

“But you do see, and nothing will ever change that.”

“Maybe.”

Another white hot wave surges through Ose, burning his fingertips and singeing the tracks of his host’s veins. He is close enough to be apprehended, but only that scalding heat rifles through him. It is both a warning and a defense mechanism.

“Step away from me.”

“Is that what it takes for you to remember what I am?” Ose asks through his teeth, grinding them together out of mingled pain and pleasure. “A closer look at yourself?”

The spark of bewilderment in those half-green eyes lends a heat that’s very different from that of the aura perpetually ringing his body. Mal’ak takes several hurried steps away from the bank and leaves Ose at his back. It isn’t tactically sound, but then, kissing him hadn’t been smart either. The fire in his blood ebbs and leaves him shaking but spectacularly, excruciatingly alive.

What he’s said is clearly too much for Mal’ak to handle, so he takes it upon himself to speak next. “Unless you decimate the very ground upon which we stand, I will outrun every one of your attempts.”

Mal’ak blinks and takes a surveying glance at the world around them. Ose can see it in his wide, shining eyes how far out of his way he would go to leave it unscathed for their preordained violence. His swallow clicks in his throat as he wrings his hands together. “You could always kill me.”

Ose shakes his head and ambles patiently to the Chak Kuyché under which Mal’ak has retreated. Its deep red flowers shiver with the wind, and Ose feels himself recreating that color in his eyes. He hums once and says, “No.”

“Why not?” Mal’ak demands like the idea of a stalemate offends him.

“Because then you would be gone,” Ose says plainly with a small shrug of his shoulders. “And it isn’t my wish for you to be.”

Sounding tired and beaten and utterly dejected about the latter, Mal’ak asks, “What is your wish, Ose?”

_Oh, but there are so many._

“I want to choose my destiny. Don’t you?”

Birds sing into the resplendent morning that has filled in around them. Mal’ak avoids meeting Ose’s eyes. “We aren’t made for that.”

“Flesh is.” Ose touches that flesh—touches for the first time without hiding. “And you were made flesh, for me.”

Mal’ak bats his hand away the first time but lets him explore on the second. “I didn’t think it could be true.”

“Fathers sell their children. It isn’t without historical precedent.”

“He thought you were worth it,” he mumbles.

“He thinks I’m filth, Akh,” Ose murmurs with a warm smile. Whatever good it would do him to help Mal’ak forget it, he still hears himself saying, “He valued _you_.”

Mal’ak breaks away from him and walks toward the city. “I suppose you think you do, too.”

“Not yet.”

He stops abruptly to fix Ose with a distrustful glance over his shoulder.

“Give me time to learn your worth.”

Mal’ak faces forward and continues to walk, agitation quickening his pace. “You say that like I haven’t already given you time.”

Ose smirks and follows after him. “You’ve been using it to run from me.”

“One of us had to run,” he retorts dismissively, eyes stubbornly on the road ahead of them.

“You’re wrong, you know.”

“So are you.” Mal’ak shrugs. 

“What about?” Ose sidles up to be shoulder to shoulder with him. In these bodies Mal’ak is more than a head taller than Ose.

“Me. This flesh is for me, not for you.”

“Not for your Father either?” Ose asks lightly, ravenous for the response.

Mal’ak looks at him, bright eyes catching in the sun. “I am as He intended.”

If he believes what he says, Ose is willing to accept it. He thinks he’d take it anyway, geared toward his favor as it is. A minor deflection now can’t deter him when Mal’ak looks the way he does in the full light of the morning.

There is so much _more_ waiting for them beyond today. Ose means to take it all. He means to consume it just as the aura works to consume him. He falls into step with the angel at his side, comparing their bodies and considering what the differences would be between his and the many skins Ose has worn since his arrival in Tenochtitlan.

Around a lazy smile he utters, “You are fearsome, Akh. Beauty is terror _and_ splendor.”

He turns to catch just the corner of what looks to be a poorly hidden smirk. It’s another sight means to keep. Mal’ak will have a home in the palace stockpiled with Ose’s most treasured memories.

His will be a room with polished floors and marble walls. Someday they will splash it in red together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chinampa – floating garden, a method of Mesoamerican agriculture  
> Dumu Aĝ – child of Heaven  
> Huitzilli is a Nahuatl name that means Hummingbird  
> Pitahaya is dragon fruit  
> Tlilxochitl is the vanilla orchid   
> Patesis were governors of ancient Sumer (in this story they’re basically immortal prophets)  
> Aḫḫāzu – a demon  
> Tiyānquiztli – a marketplace  
> Mizquitl – mesquite   
> Chak Kuyché – Shaving Brush Tree


	2. This Side of the Law

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Freddie gets an exclusive from Abel Gideon, the man who claims to be the Chesapeake Ripper.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Well, I didn’t really think that I did wrong / So long as I stayed here where I belong / I did the only thing I could, / Same as anybody would / And I was simply trying to get along / On this side of the law, / On that side of the law, / Who is right? Who is wrong?_

Wendell wakes up on a Tuesday. Freddie’s there by some miracle when he blinks his eyes open, all foggy and affectionate from morphine and confusion. “What’s going on?” he asks, reaching fumblingly for her hand.

“You were in a wreck, Wendell,” she tells him slowly, carefully. “You don’t remember?”

He closes his eyes again, head lolling from side to side on his pillow. She smiles as he complains: “My head hurts.”

“Well, it would. You flipped your Altima on the highway. There was a huge pile-up. You impeded a police chase.”

“Oh, no,” he moans, sounding pained and delirious. “I totaled Monica?”

Freddie rolls her eyes at that. “Yes, Wendell. You were also in a coma. Are you listening to me?”

“She was the…best car, ever.” He hiccups and squeezes her hand. “What am I going to do now?”

“Wendell…” A nurse fusses with his chart at the end of the bed, giving them a sympathetic smile. “Is it the drugs making him so emotional?”

“He’ll be more relaxed with it,” the nurse tells her. “Could be he’s just happy to see you.”

Freddie sighs, reaching for her bag when her phone chimes. She checks the screen and stands at the sight of the blocked number. She would let it go to voicemail, but there’s no way to return the call after the person’s hung up. Wendell’s current nurse approaches to ask him some simple questions as if right on cue, so Freddie makes use of the opportunity to walk out into the hallway and take the call.

“Miss Lounds,” an unfamiliar voice—not an uncommon occurrence—greets her. “You don’t know me. I work at the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.”

Freddie leans back against the wall, biting her lip thoughtfully. She’s heard of the hospital in question. Abel Gideon killed a nurse there while still in custody. It was all over the news. Instead of leading with that, she says, “Hello.”

The speaker clears his throat. “I can’t talk long. I need you to come see Abel Gideon and give him an exclusive.”

Crossing her arms, she asks, “Why would I do that?”

Her curiosity is genuine. There’s no reason she _wouldn’t_ want to cover Gideon’s story with what’s presently going around in the papers about him. She wants to hear this guy’s reasoning, though. The _why_ is often more interesting than the _what_ anyway. 

“He’s convinced he’s the Chesapeake Ripper. It’s why he killed that nurse.”

“The Chesapeake Ripper,” she repeats, interested. If what he’s saying is true, she’d be the first to run with that story. The revelation must have come from inside the hospital rather than through law enforcement. She can’t imagine Jack Crawford would allow anyone else to make that declaration if that had been the case, but naturally, that means that what her current C.I. is telling her hasn’t been empirically proven. “What do you have that supports his claims?”

“Other than his testimony and the fact that the Ripper’s been silent in all the time that Gideon’s been locked up?”

“Yes.”

The man on the other line sighs. “Hold on a moment, please?”

“Okay.”

There’s some clattering and something that sounds like whispering, but it’s too far away from the phone’s receiver for her to decipher words out of it. He comes back to the phone. “He’s been mentioning someone else. Will Graham.”

It shouldn’t surprise her that he knows to play this card. If anything, it heightens her suspicion tenfold.

“What has he mentioned about Will Graham?”

“Look, I’d lose my job if anyone knew I talked to you.”

“You haven’t given me your name,” she reminds him. “This remains as anonymous as you want it to.”

He takes a deep breath and says, “All right. Before Gideon got sick—and I mean _right before_ he went off the rails and killed Mary Trevor—Will Graham was here to see him at least once a week. The murder happened right after Graham left for Minnesota.”

It’s an interesting development. She could do something with it—could raise hell with it if she wanted to. Crawford likely knows that anyone could, and perhaps that’s why Gideon’s self-imposed allegations have not been made public. Surely there’s something else to it. Gideon may well have been an established serial killer in his own right and a vicious one at that, but it’s a big jump from wife-killer to _the_ Chesapeake Ripper.

She doesn’t like Gideon for it. Why stir up a mess now? Even if it was something to do with Will Graham, why…?

The only explanation that readily makes sense is that Gideon knows Crawford has Will Graham working the Ripper’s case. Evidently they were close for one reason or another or he wouldn’t have visited him so frequently. Before him, the FBI never troubled with Gideon or anyone in Chilton’s hospital for that matter. Maybe Gideon threw a monkey wrench into the mix as a way of trying to lead his friend, by all accounts, away from the Ripper. But to what end? To keep him safe?

There’s no need to catch someone who’s already been caught. It would have taken him out of harm’s way. If Gideon knew something that Graham didn’t, perhaps a sacrifice was the only way to save him from it.

“Has he asked to see me specifically?”

“He hasn’t asked for anyone, period. Doctors keep coming to evaluate him, but he keeps telling them the same thing. Will Graham, too, when he was still making an effort to talk to Gideon.”

“What do you expect me to do about his situation?”

“I just want his story out. I can’t tell you why, okay? It’s personal. I’ve known him a year now, and the truth about this needs to come out. He killed Mary, but he wasn’t in the right state of mind when he did it, and what he’s saying now, it’s…it’s…” He stumbles for a few seconds like he’s lost his footing. All goes quiet on his end, and then with a renewed confidence he hasn’t had during the entire conversation thus far, he says, “I think Gideon is a victim of psychic driving.”

“By Frederick Chilton?” 

It’s a no-brainer beyond that point. Selling Gideon as the Chesapeake Ripper when Freddie herself doesn’t buy it for a minute wouldn’t shake or move anyone, but a breach of ethics within the system that was meant to keep him and the people treating him safe? Corruption within the institution that was supposed to help people?

Oh, but Freddie can sell _that_. A dirty doctor is _marketable_.

She isn’t deluded; she knows it won’t magically cleanse her name for journalism. That’s a pipe dream. Maybe she’ll never be reputable. Maybe she’s beyond caring about whether people like the paper trail she leaves behind every time she writes something new for the public to read. It’s not about the readership or the bills piling up or the dues she’s long since paid. The story—this story—is the truth, and if Gideon’s been hurt by it or if he’s hurt others because of it, then everyone deserves to know.

Everyone should know. That’s all that matters.

Wendell is asleep again when she heads back into his room with a time and a date scribbled on the back of her hand. She copies the information down into her phone and waits for the numbers to line up with those on the calendar, which they do, eventually, once the week comes to a close and rolls into a new one. Wendell is still in the hospital, but he’s more himself and as a result, doesn’t go misty-eyed and mournful every time she leaves the room.

He tells her he’s fine, though she doubts that he really is. The crash left him scared and wounded, and he deserves recovery time. Anyone would need a break after having the world flipped upside down on them. The doctors were telling Wendell just last night he might walk with a cane for the rest of his life. To his credit, Wendell didn’t flinch when he heard. He only blinked and cracked a weak smile, turning to her as he said, “You didn’t want to dance at our wedding anyway, did you, Roscoe?”

She didn’t have the heart to deflect him that time. The only reasonable thing to do was hold his hand in hers, and Wendell looked happy enough for it that they felt right, right there. Suffice to say, if he does have a problem with her leaving to check out a lead, he doesn’t let her hear of it. Just like old times. He even makes a joke about the car chase he threw off on the highway—asks her if she’d like to get his story.

It’s supposed to be a joke anyway. He laughs when he says it, and then he winces and resumes eating his banana pudding. His struggle with the cast and the pillows is pitiful, more so because she cares that he’s hurt than because he’s pathetic, though he very much is in his current state. Wendell isn’t a particularly strong man on his best legs, but he is sturdy, usually. Right now he looks like a house made of sticks, all wobbly and frail at the corners.

It’s not his fault. In the elevator she remembers Zeller confronting her with his usual graceless confidence, angry before he even understood the nature of the situation with which he was dealing. She thinks about Will Graham, too, when she saw him in the flesh for all of ten seconds. First encounters always appear so warped when compared to expectations, but she could never have been prepared for the sight of him that greeted her in his room. Will Graham stuck her as reckless, touched by danger, and probably deeply troubled.

She supposes, in retrospect, that those things could easily yield an unstable personality and produce what she’d witnessed when she opened the door on him and Dr. Lecter. There’d been nothing particularly shocking about it, or there wouldn’t have been if she hadn’t gone in with a picture in her mind of how that endeavor would have gone down. It seemed strange to her, and it still does, that Will Graham would cling to anyone and cry into their shoulder, much less a rigid doctor with a befuddled, conflicted look on his face.

Will hadn’t noticed her interruption at all; his frantic pleas in an unrecognizable language hadn’t stopped, hadn’t hesitated for a second. Lecter fixed her with a startled and then unhappy expression. He hadn’t needed to tell her to leave, though her instinct had been to stay, in spite of how far it was from being any of her business. Half a question had formed on her lips when Will’s feeble protests had exploded in a single half-surprised sob that _had_ been enough to make her turn right around and flee.

And it had felt like an escape. Just as strong as her urge to protect Will Graham from whatever had wounded him so deeply was the need to get the hell out before it consumed her, too. It felt impossibly like she _would_ be consumed in that small room right there with them, and she is still at a loss for a way to explain or rationalize it.

So much of it makes no sense whatsoever. The only thing she can do is try to piece it together with the little information she has to go on. It takes a special type of person to have such a fantastic record—and one that doesn’t even span a full year. She’d considered the dreaded possibility of WitSec but had dismissed it for the lack of true blowback she’d experienced for leaking his identity.

That claim would have derailed her entirely if Jack Crawford had chosen to go with it. He hadn’t, though, so Will Graham remains fair game and his mysterious origins continue to perplex her. There had to be something incomparably compelling about him for Jack Crawford to pick him up off the NOLA streets with no evident rhyme or reason backing him up.

It’s that seemingly nonexistent past that she keeps that in mind on the drive to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. A life history for which she can’t account makes more sense to her than the here-and-now that only gets more and more complicated as she looks at it. Frederick Chilton himself meets her at the front desk. The place is a prison in everything but name, and Dr. Chilton is its overseer and warden.

“Miss Lounds, how good of you to come when a wayward soul cries your name in the dark.”

“As I understand it, even proclaimed murderers have the right to visitation,” she retorts carefully.

“Hmm, yes, unfortunately,” he drawls. There’s tension scrunched up in his shoulders augmented by the visible grimace on his face. “Be advised that the patient in question is dangerous and prone to fits of dissociation.”

“I was told over the phone that he would be in a cage,” she prompts carefully, the last word tasting sour on her tongue.

“Yes, that’s standard procedure,” he says blandly. “If you’ll just follow me this way.”

Freddie walks down the long corridor into a room filled of cages, all of them looking vaguely medieval and offensively crude. There’s a man sitting inside one of them, his head tipped forward all the way so that his chin tucks into his chest. As they approach she can see the slow rise and fall of his shoulders, facing them as he is. Chilton’s shoes scrape on the floor with a juddering misstep and Abel Gideon lifts his head slowly. His slow, disinterested blink disarms Freddie immediately, though she steels herself the moment she notices its effect on her.

“Is he drugged?” she asks Chilton while they’re still a ways off. They’ve jointly stopped walking.

“It was a necessary precaution. I only hope you won’t have to find out why.” Chilton turns curtly on his heels and walks off, voice ringing out louder but in a strange tone when he says over his shoulder, “Do not approach him, do not hand him anything, do not touch him; I believe you know what happened the last time he was in a room with another person unsupervised.”

The callous, offhanded delivery alarms her, but she’s seen enough cruelty and viscera by this point in her career as an independent journalist not to be too surprised. She is here, after all, to pursue a lead on Chilton more than she is to expose Gideon as the Chesapeake Ripper.

“Dr. Gideon.” She tries for a bold voice as she approaches the cage, making sure to keep back a safe distance. There’s a self-evident line taped onto the floor that she thinks Chilton was probably supposed to explain to her, but it makes no difference. She knows to stay on the far side of it. “My name is Freddie Lounds. Do you know why I’m here?”

“Could it be because I killed that nurse?” he drawls. There’s a masterful combination of boredom and inebriated listlessness evident in the intonation of his question. It makes his words almost musical. “Or perhaps, and this would be the more fun of the two possibilities, you’re here to talk about Will Graham.”

It feels like an invitation to come closer, but she keeps her feet rooted right where they are. He smiles, docile and glassy-eyed.

“Will Graham, then, hmm.” He hums long and low, eyes slipping away from hers and toward a faraway corner of the room, chin tilting back so that his eyelids take on a heavier appearance. “May I ask who it was that called you?”

“I’m not at liberty to say, but I couldn’t even if I was.”

“Ah,” he muses, eyes slipping closed all the way and staying that way. “Always admire a journalist who keeps her sources safe.”

“They wouldn’t trust me otherwise.”

“People don’t tend to trust you anyway, do they?” He cracks one eye open. “Difficult to do that with anyone harboring an agenda.”

“What would you say your agenda was when you killed that nurse?”

“Well, I hoped that she would die, and in that, I was successful.” Gideon rubs his hands together, swaying slightly and then inhaling sharply as he straightens out. The back of his head bumps the bars at his back, and his eyes slip open, murky sight promptly lining up with hers. “Is that really how you want to waste your first question, Miss Lounds? You’ve gotta make an impression, you know, and if you keep up this tired line of inquiry I’m going to think you’re just like everyone else who’s come through here with their pens and their pads of paper and their little boxes they yearn so desperately to check off.”

His eyes sharpen by degrees, hard to trace but easy to see once it’s manifested completely. She shrugs her purse off the curved edge of her shoulder and drops it easily onto the chair provided, watching him all the while. The corner of his mouth twitches into a pleased smirk.

“I’ll allow one more chance, Miss Lounds, and that’s all. Make it count.” She gives herself time to think while rooting around for her tape recorder, which actually gets Gideon to chuckle sardonically under his breath. “You think we can’t tell when your words are just air because every visitor is precious.”

Freddie doesn’t let herself be intimidated. Even if it’s not his intention, an elevated sense of self radiates off of Gideon. It smothers anything else in its wake, and even as she closes herself off from it, those dangerous, subtle vibes lash ceaselessly at her defenses. She presses her shoulders back and asks him to describe his state of mind when he murdered Mary Trevor.

“Oops! Wrong.” He clicks his tongue at her, shaking his head slowly at her. “You see these bars?”

She furrows her eyebrows at him and tenses when his hands shoot out to grab those bars, the movement fast but imprecise and probably scraping his knuckles against the unbending iron. His eyelashes flutter like the gesture made him dizzy. Whatever cocktail or intravenous drug roosting in his body is a long way from passing through his system. He laughs again, softly but hitting resonant notes and sounding genuine like his disorientation is a point of amusement for him. It might be for all Freddie knows.

“What about them, Doctor?”

He sucks in a quick, stabilizing breath and squeezes them once in his fingers before slumping back. “Why do you think they’re here?”

“Dr. Chilton said it’s protocol: a precautionary measure.”

“Yes, he would have said that. Sounds like him, too—so diplomatic when it comes to explaining away his vices.”

It’s as good a redirect as any and an even better starting point since Gideon took their conversation there all by himself. She’s careful not to glance at the voice recorder on the chair, asking, “And what vices would those be?”

Gideon licks his lips and rolls his head one way and then the other along the bars behind him. “He wishes to be a superior being, and the fact of his incompetency frustrates him. What better way to emulate a monster than to put him in a cage and pour poison into his ear? It’s better than the alternative, certainly. No blood on his hands; plenty on mine, see?”

He holds his hands up, palms clearly displayed.

“Has it been suggested to you that your ideas about yourself and about the Ripper weren’t yours to begin with?”

Gideon stares at her, stunned for only a three-count before his shoulders shake and he closes his eyes to laugh. It’s a nice laugh, reminds her vaguely of torrential winds blowing through the boughs of vernal trees. If it lacked just a portion of his inebriated exhaustion, he would sound happy to her. The thought is a painful one and for very worrying, indefinable reasons that start somewhere in the back of her spine and spread out all the way to her fingertips and the nerve endings in her scalp. It’s like static crackling in the air seconds before lightning tears the sullen currents apart in a mess of insolent, fluid electricity.

“The psychiatrists have come and gone, my dear. It’s just us now, and the wolves.” He nods his head at the far corner of the vast room again, tipping his chin back as he does.

Freddie turns and immediately sees the security camera. A cursory glance around the room doesn’t give her much, but the message is plenty obvious. She returns her gaze to Gideon, whose eyes are now fixed on her shoes. Between his eyebrows sits a lonely, distressed wrinkle.

“Dr. Gideon?”

“Your question, Fredericka, is whether I have been the victim of psychic driving, no?”

She keeps her mouth in a hard, unhesitant line and nods once. He nods, too.

“Could I tell you something very, very secret?” he whispers.

Freddie nods and keeps herself on the safe side of the taped line, ever precautious no matter how her curiosity sings for this information.

When he merely continues to look back and forth between her feet she asks him, “What is it?”

“You can’t…can’t trust…”

She nearly takes a step back, every red flag going right up at this change in behavior that could likely be manipulation on his part. Chilton’s words sound in her ears like a siren: _You know what happened the last time he was in a room with another person unsupervised._

“Why did you kill Mary Trevor, Doctor?”

He opens his mouth and mumbles, “Because—?” His voice wobbles around the second syllable. As quickly as he raised them, he snatches his hands away from the bars like they’ve just burned him. “Because…she-she was…” He squeezes his eyes closed, arms shooting out to either side of him to clutch at the bars again. Newfound energy surges through his form and he lurches to his feet, crying out as if in pain.

“Abel,” she tries, taking half a step forward and then immediately changing her mind. Her leg bumps the chair back and the legs screech against the floor. His gaze jumps up to hers, the intent behind those eyes trapped in a thousand-yard stare that misses her but remembers her presence all the same.

He breathes a word that sounds like ‘camel’ and blinks hard several times to clear his vision or whatever it is he _thinks_ he sees.

“I’m Abel Gideon,” he mutters rapidly to himself, eyes still fixed on hers. His brow twitches down once and then again in a more deliberate scowl. “No, no, I’m—that isn’t…am I the—aren’t I the…?”

Freddie does step forward then, and she tells him in the same firm voice she used with Wendell when he heard about his leg, “No.”

“But I…”

Tears well up in his eyes, fast enough to give Freddie whiplash, though she accepts it without blinking. She tells him, slowly, “You killed Mary Trevor; you killed your wife Katya Vitalis along with her brother and parents.”

“Katya Vitalis,” he repeats the name like a prayer. “Katya, Katya. Those are mine. The name Vitalis—it’s mine.”

Freddie measuredly takes back that step she gave previously, correcting the space between them to an appropriate distance. Clearly Gideon’s dissociated, or relapsed. She can’t say she knows _what_ this is or that there’s a real way to talk about it outside of blaming the drugs clouding his mind and impairing his judgment. Too much emphasis on the drugs would be just as bad as not considering them in the first place.

“What do you remember about killing Mary Trevor?”

His eyes flicker back into the present moment for a few lucid seconds before glazing over into something that isn’t entirely apathy but that’s trying very hard to be.

“Gouging her eyes out,” he answers evenly, with a forced blasé expression on his face. “Impaling her corpse with a series of absurdly lethal objects. It was, perhaps, more violent a death than she could have deserved.”

“Why did you replicate the Chesapeake Ripper’s murder?”

“Is that what I did? Is that the thought that entered into my mind when I killed her?” he asks, voice dripping with irony that she doesn’t understand. “You appear to be certain of something, Miss Lounds. Every damn shrink, profiler, et cetera ad infinitum who comes in here looking to pick my brain thinks they’ll find the missing link in the things I say or don’t say, in the way I react to peculiar stimuli, perhaps even in something so inane as my speech patterns.”

“And Will Graham?”

He pauses, mouth open and lungs filled with adequate breath for a response that dies on his lips that slowly press together and remain in a frustrated frown. His head tilts ever so slowly to one side, so neat and mechanical that it registers in her mind as almost reptilian.

“Do you think I mean to reach out to him by contacting you, Miss Lounds?”

“I know you didn’t contact me, Dr. Gideon.”

“Is that what you know?” He clenches his jaw, shivering and losing his breath for no apparent reason. His knees wobble, and he looks down, remembering that he stood to his feet and never sat back down. Softly he repeats his question: “Is that what you know?”

It’s obvious by now to Freddie that Gideon has been the victim of _something_ terrible and that it’s changed him. The charming narcissist he is masquerading to be on the surface is exactly that—a surface feature. Inquiries about Chilton and their therapy won’t give her anything useful. She’s surprised the room wasn’t stormed at the first mention of psychic driving, however inadvertent it had been. Gideon wants to talk about Will Graham, even if a very insistent, aggressive part of him is screaming at him not to.

Freddie can see that resistance, too. She can see how it pushes both ways in Gideon’s mind and how it’s rupturing his conception of reality, tugging him one way and then the other. The drugs must be Chilton’s answer to those episodic battles between one side and the other. It must have been the easiest possible solution once all other avenues were exhausted and Gideon _stayed_ broken. 

She takes these observations and slows herself down. Gideon may not understand the dynamic of what’s happening to him, and by no means does Freddie think she does, limited as her knowledge on psychology is. She knows enough to _get by_ , certainly, but that doesn’t make her qualified to deal with this. Hell no, she’s not equipped to talk Gideon through it, but somebody somewhere decided it was going to be her. She’s not about to turn down that responsibility when she can feel the beginnings of the truth unfurling beneath her grasping fingertips.

“You had rapport with Will Graham, an understanding that no one appears to have any information about.”

“Crawford, Chilton, Matthew, MacCailín,” he counts off names to himself. Trademark spite filtering back into his attitude he says, “They know, but they won’t tell you a damn thing.”

“Then you tell me. You know about it, don’t you? You have access to those memories.”

He bites his lip, icy awareness sparking in his dull eyes. “I can’t trust my memories.”

“Why not?”

“Because they tell me I’m the Chesapeake Ripper, Miss Lounds, and clearly, as you say, I am not.” He gestures at himself and at the cage holding him. “It’s all part of the elaborate prison—a projection of the cell my very mind has become. Is that what you want me to say? Will that _print_ nicely?”

“What do your memories tell you about Will Graham?” she persists, ignoring his questions. “What do you believe about him that’s keeping you from pushing through it for the truth?”

Gideon’s face turns to stone. His eyes darken and his teeth click in his mouth. “They tell me he can’t be trusted.”

“Based off of what?”

He grimaces like the obvious lack of a sensible answer makes him want to crawl out of his skin. “I don’t know.”

“Think.”

“And what will happen if I remember? Who will I be once the fiction’s been removed?”

Freddie checks herself at the honest questions that merit honest answers. She doesn’t know—doesn’t know that she will publish any of this, though she feels distinctly that she must. There is no language in her repertoire with which to speak of it. She’s at a loss as to how to tell anyone what it is she’s dealing with. All she can grasp is that it’s toxic and that it spills over into everything like an opportunistic virus.

Perfectly cognizant of how tenuous her comprehension of this conversation truly is, she finds herself saying, “Then you can be who you are, and not who you think you’re supposed to be.”

Gideon considers that for a long moment, and then a door opens noisily on the other side of the room. Freddie doesn’t look up until the footsteps come to a rest right beside her chair. The orderly swings a large ring of keys around his finger. Freddie listens carefully for his voice, but he’s not the one who called to invite her here.

He says, “Time, Ms. Lounds.”

“Thank you, Mr. Brown,” Gideon drawls tiredly, shoulders drooping and chin nodding down with gravity.

“What did you give him?” she snaps, unable to help herself and really having no intense desire to do any such thing, even if Gideon is right there listening. Brown merely frowns at her and angles his head to the door through which she entered the room. She follows him and waits patiently for his meek explanation.

“He woke up this morning screaming and throwing himself into walls. The sedative was to keep him from doing any permanent damage.”

She squints at him and then looks back at Gideon, a heavier question nagging at the back of her mind and festering on her tongue. He holds his hands up, tilting his head back at the same corner of the room to which Gideon kept referring. Brown lightly pushes her toward the exit, muttering, “I need to get him back to his room. You need to be clear of the area when I do that. It’s procedure.”

He tips his head in a clumsy dismissal and walks back to Gideon’s cage. More than a little indignant at what now feels like a colossal waste of her time, Freddie walks back to the front desk unaided, hearing someone at the front desk speaking on the phone. His voice is the one that spoke to her on the phone. She stands staring at him for a few seconds but averts her eyes when he catches her looking, gives her a harmless, naïve smile, and goes back to the person whose call he is currently taking.

She prides herself on being able to read people, and this guy—Stephen, or so the hospital ID badge carelessly laid out before him by the computer monitor—isn’t invested in her being here. If someone had him make the call for them, the favor’s all but left his mind by now. Stephen is a good choice, simple-minded but not against helping someone he considers a friend.

Freddie keeps that in mind and leaves the premises, treading heavily on the way to her car and dumping her purse on the passenger’s seat upon getting in. The off-kilter bag tilts precariously and tosses half its contents out onto the floor of the car. Her voice recorder remains inside, thankfully, but her phone, wallet, and a tube of lip balm go tumbling down. When she leans over to retrieve them she notices a tiny white card seesawing on the edge of the seat that looks unfamiliar enough to draw her attention.

It’s neither a receipt nor a business card proper. Upon closer examination she sees that it’s an address designating Wolf Trap, Virginia as the location. She types it into the map on her phone and tracks the distance from there to Quantico. It’s less than an hour away.

Freddie starts the car and calls Wendell while she debates what to do. He answers on the fourth ring, sounding frustrated.

“Are you going to be all right for a few more hours?”

“Yes,” he says in a clipped voice. It sounds more like the result of pain than irritation. “I’m fine. Do what you gotta do, Roscoe.”

She runs a hand through her hair and takes a few seconds to listen to him breathe in and out. “Tell the doctor you’re in pain, Wendell.”

“Then they’ll just push more of that stuff into my veins,” he grumbles, sheets and pillow case rustling as he moves. “I hate that more than I hate hurting a little bit.”

Freddie opens her mouth and swallows when the statement knocks the breath right out of her lungs.

“Are _you_ okay? Freddie, hey.”

“Yeah, I’m just working.” She nods to herself, sinking back against the seat and every subtle vibration the engine sends through her car. “Do you remember when I wrote about Will Graham? The man from Louisiana?”

“Hard to forget a guy that almost got me arrested,” he says wistfully. “Why? What’s going on?”

“Maybe nothing,” she murmurs, thumbing the piece of paper in her hand and searing the address into her memory. “Maybe a new lead.”

“Well, go get ‘em,” he says, half-teasingly but mostly out of genuine encouragement. “Go break that story before someone else does.”

She smiles. “And you get some rest.”

“After I eat every last one of these pudding cups.”

“Eventually they’ll stop bringing them to you, Wendell.”

“Nope, see, the nurses think I am adorable, and I mean, they’re right, obviously.”

She snorts.

A quiet moment shivers over their connection, and he sighs. “I hope this one works out for you.”

“Thank you,” she says from behind closed eyes, more peaceful than nervous. “I’ll come see you when I’m done.”

“I look forward to it. Be careful.”

Freddie is exceedingly careful the entire way to Wolf Trap. She’s careful not to drive too fast, not to take wrong turns or get off at the wrong exits, and she’s careful not to get her hopes up, though the last one isn’t something she’s managing too well.

There are three dogs that come to investigate her car when she pulls up the dirt driveway and parks the car. A man she’s never seen before walks out through the door. He’s got a dish towel in his hands.

“Hi, Lloyd Bowman,” he introduces himself.

“Freddie Lounds. I’m…sorry, someone gave me your address, I don’t—”

“You’re at the right place.” He nods. “Do you want to come inside?”

She thinks to refuse, but there must be something here if all signs indicated this spot. One of the dogs, small, white, and sporting a pronounced underbite sniffs ostentatiously at her leg. “Yes, thank you.”

“I know you were expecting Will.” He leads the way into the cozy, spacious house and shrugs. “That’s the general consensus since we picked him up in NOLA. It’s a bit unfortunate, really. He’s not really fit to handle the attention. His life was pretty private before the fact—probably not hard to believe.”

“There’s no record of him living anywhere under the name Will Graham.”

“No, there wouldn’t be.” He shrugs once more good-naturedly. His demeanor is all ease and companionability. “Poor guy fell on hard times a few years back. Tried starting fresh a few times, but it never worked out for him.”

Freddie reaches into her purse on the pretense of tucking her keys into one of the pockets and presses a familiarly marked button on her voice recorder. “What did he do prior to assisting the FBI on homicide investigations?”

“Mostly freelance work, anything he could find. He was teaching for a while at a Florida university, but he made a series of really regrettable decisions that threw everything out of balance. You can imagine; he had to pack up and relocate.”

“What was it that happened?”

“He was stabbed,” Lloyd Bowman answers readily, though he looks queasy at the admission. He strides into the kitchen. “Something to drink?”

“No, I’m fine. I don’t…what were the conditions that led up to the assault?”

“There was a—well, ah—” His dark skin flushes red right in the apples of his cheeks. “There was an, um, _indecent_ affair that took place with a student. Sordid, the whole thing.” He waves his hand like he doesn’t want to talk more about it. “Look, he hates that it happened, all right? That’s the point. He left Florida, went through some really shady circuits to become a new person, and wound up doing a whole mess of seedy things in Louisiana. As you know, that’s where we found him.”

“You put an unstable man with a shaky moral code into the field with no training?”

“That’s the thing. He used to be a cop, back in Florida. There was friction in his department, and he got stuck teaching college kids looking to get an easy credit taking Forensics and Criminology.”

Freddie looks at him, shuffles a bit when a larger dog sniffs at the back of her hand. “Are you kidding me right now?”

Lloyd laughs, chagrined, and rubs at the back of his head with one hand. “What were you expecting? That he used to be a spy? That he’s got…magic powers that help him catch bad guys? Even if that were the truth, and hey, it’d be awesome if it was, it’s not like we can collar a perp because one of our guys ‘had a premonition’ about where the murder weapon was hidden. Police work doesn’t function under those parameters. Neither does the law.”

“So why tell me any of this?” Freddie snaps at him, frustrated and about at her rope’s end with this story that she doesn’t believe but that really begs to be accepted for the truth because it makes more sense than anything else she’s encountered so far where Will Graham is concerned. “Why tell me about his past if you know it could cause problems for him if it got out? You know what I do—that I run a blog for stories like this.”

“I do know that. I know all of that.” Lloyd leans back against the counter. “I also know that you nearly cost a detective and a nurse their jobs trying to find out where he came from and in what condition the run-in with Lottie Tasse left him.”

She doesn’t wince. She doesn’t.

“I know you agreed to see Abel Gideon today because you believed he may have been pushed to do what he did to Mary Trevor, not because he made a choice but because someone got in his head and did it for him.”

Freddie waits and holds her ground.

“You’re free to publicize what I’ve told you if you believe it’ll even the scales, but I really don’t know what you’d actually accomplish in outing him now that he’s finally got solid ground under his feet.”

“And Abel Gideon?” Freddie asks when her lungs can take in air again. “His relationship with Will Graham?”

“Turns out Gideon comes from uncertain origins, too. They both had to start over after losing everything—even if what Gideon did was worse. Sometimes circumstance decides our friends more than we do.”

“He’s changed his mind about your mutual friend,” she says of Gideon. “Says he can’t be trusted. What do you make of that?”

“You mean, apart from the fact that Gideon’s on file for several mental breakdowns and psychotic episodes since he killed Mary Trevor?”

She grits her teeth and says, “Yes, apart from that.”

Lloyd sighs and looks away. “It was right after we left for Minnesota. You know, the Hobbs case.”

Freddie nods. She followed that story, too, religiously.

“It was the first time Will left after waking up from his coma. So, what does that suggest? I mean, separation anxiety, paranoia? Our working theory is that Gideon posed as the Ripper as a way of drawing Will’s attention back onto him, but when he realized that doing so hurt their relationship more than anything else, he couldn’t deal with the consequences.”

It’s the rational explanation she’d wanted. All of it is so commonplace and unassuming that she nearly trusts it to be exactly what it looks like: a deranged but lonely serial killer editing reality to match his fantasies and a ruined but reformed ex-cop now moonlighting as a consultant.

Oh, but it would make so much sense.

And she knows that’s exactly the point.

She ducks her head and dons her most shamefaced expression. “When you put it like that, it’s almost mundane.”

“What’s the alternative?” he asks flatly, holding his hands up in question and twisting his palms upward in an unconscious bid for supplication. 

It’s one of the oldest tells in the book. She almost laughs upon recognizing it.

_You were so nearly out of the woods, Bowman. Too bad, so sad._

“Of course, you’re right,” she agrees mutedly. “That’s the only plausible explanation.”

He sags slightly through his shoulders. “Maybe you’ll leave him alone now that you know he’s just an ordinary guy.”

How misguided he is, this Lloyd Bowman. She wonders if this scheme was his own, or if it was contrived between him and other people. If Will Graham had a hand in it, she might actually admire the audacity of the ruse. It would have convinced someone else, maybe, but it doesn’t convince Freddie.

There’s no need for Lloyd Bowman to know that, of course. Even if his attempts to fool her haven’t obfuscated Will from her sights, _she_ can use it to _her_ advantage and let them think she suspects not a single thing. Really, they went through so much effort; it’d be a waste not to cash in on it.

Bowman sees her out and doesn’t suspect a thing. She plays the full recording of their conversation through on the drive back to Baltimore, and then she listens to her session with Gideon. Freddie has half a mind to delete Bowman’s recording since it’s so farcical and untrue but thinks better of it. Keeping it on hand might come in handy one day.

It’s impossible to know what variation of reality people will choose to believe in from one day to the next, and now she knows she can’t trust the subjects of her primary concern to be upfront about any of it. The least Freddie can do is keep track of it all. Perhaps she and Gideon are the same in that respect. 

When she gets back to Wendell’s room at the hospital he’s fast asleep and his morphine intake has been bumped up quite a few notches. There are upwards of six emptied pudding cups in the trash on the side of his good hand. She finds herself actually relieved and sets up her laptop at his other side and types up a post all about the psychological turmoil she witnessed in Abel Gideon.

She calls the article “How the Ripper Rips.” It’s her least bloody story to date but still one of the more violent ones, she thinks—though it’s violence of a very different kind than what TattleCrime is used to.

Wendell sleeps all the way through the night as the hit count slowly creeps from zero to seven to thirty-five to seventy, and upwards and onwards. Freddie plugs in a pair of headphones and listens once more to Bowman’s seemingly nonchalant but now obviously contrived spiel. It was a good effort on his part, but it only causes her to wonder more about what he’s trying so hard to hide in pushing such a likely story onto her.

It’s a good line; she’ll give him that. Hearing it from Will Graham instead of through a third party would have been more believable, but they probably had come to an agreement about how that should be dealt with, too.

They’ve given her a puzzle, and what’s more is she isn’t sure whether Will Graham played any part in it at all. He wasn’t involved in the initial phone call; he was nowhere to be seen at either the hospital or Lloyd Bowman’s home. She questions now if he even knew this whole thing had been orchestrated in the first place. Were his friends and coworkers just tired of his lack of personal history coming back to haunt them collectively so they devised a plan to disperse Freddie’s suspicions about him?

Oh, this is good. It’s unknown, and it’s potentially unknowable but only in part.

She _will_ know it all in due time. And when she does, she’ll have the facts and she’ll know exactly who is responsible and accountable for what. Just like with Gideon, she can expose the FBI’s unethical exploitation and endangerment of an underqualified field agent once all the pieces come together. Or if it points in the opposite direction, and Will Graham deserves her scrutiny for other reasons—if he hung around the likes of Abel Gideon for very different affinities they shared—then she will expose that, too.

Maybe she would have let it go before, but now there’s a girl in a coma and both her parents are dead. A nurse is dead, and the previously docile patient that killed her is a danger to himself and to others. There are stakes involved.

No one else wants to address the risks or the consequences. Freddie has no problem tackling that task head-on.

She never has. It’s not as if she’ll stop now.


	3. I Walk the Line

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bella worries about Will after everything that happened with Gideon, so she decides to do something about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _You’ve got a way to keep me on your side / You give me cause for love that I can’t hide / For you I know I’d even try to turn the tide / Because you’re mine, I walk the line_
> 
>  
> 
> Then everything includes itself in power,  
> Power into will, will into appetite;  
> And appetite, a universal wolf,  
> So doubly seconded with will and power,   
> Must make perforce a universal prey,  
> And last eat up himself.  
> \--William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

Bella goes to the doctor on Tuesday, and Jack invites Dr. Lecter to dinner on Wednesday. He’s polite, if strangely cold in some places and unexpectedly warm in others. He’s only just begun working with the FBI, consulting in all matters Will Graham just like Will consults in all matters to do with the supernatural. They don’t talk about it at the dinner table, but it’s assumed that they all have a similar grasp on the subjects remaining unspoken.

Jack likes Dr. Lecter well enough. He recommends him as a therapist once it’s just the two of them washing dishes in the kitchen following their dinner of take-out and red wine.

“I just want to make sure I do everything I can to look out for you, even if there are some things I’m not equipped to deal with,” he says over the dishtowel he’s using to dry the wine glasses while Bella thoroughly washes her hands at his left.

“Because you’re worried about what’s coming,” she says in the same cautionary tone, trying to be helpful. From the looks of it, her words only agitate his concerns.

“Crazier and crazier things keep happening. Will got sick, Abel Gideon went off the rails, and now both of them are acting different.”

“What do you mean? About Will?” Bella already knows what Abel Gideon did.

“I can’t explain it. He’s just…off, and I know he’s hiding something from me.”

“About the cases?”

“No, about the other thing.”

“The angelic-demonic thing,” Bella supplies, trying to help again but only succeeding in making Jack frown. “All right, what do you think he’s not being forthcoming about?”

Jack sighs and shakes his head. “This whole thing with Hobbs just rubbed me the wrong way. I can’t put my finger on it yet, but there’s something there. Maybe the encephalitis had lasting effects on his brain, or on the way he used to function, before.”

Bella gives him a slow, steady glance and asks, “You really don’t have a handle on this at all, do you?”

“I really don’t.”

“Okay,” she says, chuckling in spite of her efforts not to. Thankfully, Jack laughs, too. She extracts the wrung out dishtowel from his hands. “Give me that, here. Into the living room. March.”

They sit next to each other on the long couch, and Bella covers his hand with her own just for good measure.

“What makes you think he’s not being completely honest with you?”

“He told us as much, first of all,” Jack says, rubbing his thumb along the underside of her wrist. “Beverly informed me of a conversation they had in Louisiana after Will was shot. He said he’d help us with the nuts and bolts, essentially, but that the higher-up stuff he’d be keeping to himself.”

“And,” Bella prompts, searching his face for clues as to where his mind is taking this line of thought. She guesses, “The Hobbs case?”

“Yes,” he sighs. “He’s at Abigail Hobbs’ bedside anytime we don’t have him on the clock. Her father…” Jack falters, like he hasn’t decided how much to disclose with her and forgot that he would need to decide at some point.

“He killed girls her age, with her features,” Bella says softly.

Jack deflates slightly. “Maybe I’m paranoid for thinking it, Bella, but…now that I know what we’re up against, I feel like we’re bound to come across demonic possessions and disillusioned fallen angels every new case we take on. Thing is he hasn’t said anything except for Abel Gideon and possible interference from certain…others. And this business with Garret Jacob Hobbs? All of it feels off to me, like there’s something big we’re missing that if we could just see it, it’d all come together and make sense.”

Bella squeezes his hand, and he leans against her briefly, nudging her shoulder with his. She tells him, “If he didn’t mention anything, maybe it’s because he didn’t see it.”

Jack nods slowly, a spark of something flashing in his eyes after a few quiet, lulled moments. His mouth falls open.

“Maybe he just didn’t see anything,” he repeats. Bella tilts her head at him. His eyes search hers helplessly. “He wouldn’t even have known.”

“What does that mean?”

“It was an infection of the brain—he—oh, God, I have to call Dr. Lecter.”

“You’re welcome,” she calls out to his retreating figure. He doubles back to leave a kiss on her forehead, and this time when he goes she smiles at his back. The couch is long even for three people so she stretches out and closes her eyes, listening vaguely to Jack’s animated conversation on the phone, presumably with Dr. Lecter. He must be excited about this idea she’s given him since he clearly didn’t bother to shut the study door behind him.

_“We can’t know one way or another, but don’t you think it’s possible…yes, if the inflammation could have sapped his abilities…indefinitely, even…he told me it’d happen sooner or later…there’s no way he could know, is there? We can’t exactly test him for that…”_

After, Bella drifts for a while. She catches every few exchanges on Jack’s side but loses track of the situation for the most part. When Jack wakes her up a while later, he looks more tired than he did before he ran off to make the phone call.

They go to bed. Jack keeps whatever’s going on with Will under lock and key—maybe for her safety or maybe for Will’s. She really doesn’t know how it works in Jack’s mind or how much of it is Will asking him not to blab all his secrets. But Will likes her—has a bit of a very noticeable crush on her, in fact, so she doesn’t think it’s him pulling the strings here.

That belief is further bolstered the following night when they go to Lloyd Bowman’s house for dinner. Will looks less like a child from the last time she saw him; something about the Lyme disease left him changed.

She tries to engage him in conversation, but he shuts down anything referencing back to Tenochtitlan and makes it known very early on that he won’t speak of it.

“It happened, and it’s gone now,” he says after her second question while Lloyd’s pouring the wine.

Jack gives him a sharp look from across the table, but Bella mediates before Will can put words to his chagrined downcast eyes. She tells him, “I wouldn’t want to always be asked about something that hurt me either.”

Will continues to bear a chastised expression and a rigid posture the whole way through dinner. He’s even worse the next time they see him for dinner at theirs following the weekend. Bella campaigns for the gathering especially hard so that he won’t feel alienated from them because of one rocky evening, but things are worse.

Lloyd Bowman joins them and speaks for Will where he outright refuses. Bella figures out the problem fairly quickly.

They told him about Jack’s suspicion, and he’s been able to think of nothing else but the evident damage living inside of him and making him somehow lesser. She wants to speak of it and tell him how far from the mark those thoughts would be if Will is having them, but the stiff set of his shoulders and the deep frown on his face tell her he isn’t receptive to that kind of talk right now. Maybe he won’t ever be.

“Why did you tell him?” she snaps at Jack after Will and Lloyd Bowman have left and she’s left Jack with the dishes out of futile irritation.

“Why did I tell who what?” he asks, looking genuinely stunned at her outburst. His hands slow around the plate he’s currently washing.

“You didn’t share your theory about the encephalitis with Will?”

“No, I only told Dr. Lecter,” he assures her, relaxing when he sees that that’s what’s bothering her. “He advised me not to say anything. Actually he predicted that Will might lapse into this kind of behavior if I did, but that he’s here already makes me think Will’s initial psych evaluation was correct.”

“You mean that he’s susceptible to depression?” Bella offers without really meaning to solicit an answer. “That trying to adjust into this lifestyle isn’t going to happen overnight? That maybe it won’t ever happen, especially not if you keep putting him in the field?”

“Bella, we’ve been over this.”

“That was before. Did you see him tonight? He looked like he was in pain.”

Jack sets the washed plate down and quickly dries his hands, maybe sensing that she’s about to walk away from him. He says, “You have to trust me on this, okay?”

“Trust you on what, Jack? That you won’t let him break open when he looks broken already?”

“He needs time to get back on his feet,” Jack says with a faint air of protest. “Anyone would after what he went through. It’s not just the encephalitis. It’s Abel Gideon leaving him in the dust, it’s Freddie Lounds hanging on his every move, it’s Abigail Hobbs lying comatose in a hospital bed. It’s everything, Bella. I _know_. He’s doing the best that he can.”

“I never questioned that,” she says softly, leaving him a few seconds to reply and then leaving the room when he doesn’t.

The next day her test results come in, and she wonders if the feeling she gets like she’s falling through the floor would parallel Will’s feeling when he inevitably discovers what Jack and Dr. Lecter are keeping from him. She wonders if it’ll feel like all the air and all the time has flown out of the room and left him struggling to breathe.

She hopes for his sake that he feels nothing at all, but she knows so much better than to believe that that will be his experience. At Dr. Lecter’s where they’ve driven with Will for dinner that weekend, they have a meal of decadently cooked rabbit. Will doesn’t appear to taste it, but he tries to make conversation. Bella can _see_ him trying, can see him straining to attend to what they’re saying in the first place.

Dr. Lecter tries to bring him out of his dour mood with some light humor that evokes no response. Will does look up at one point, though, and that alone has their mutual doctor smiling softly and subtly behind his wine glass. It’s enough of a gesture that Bella can see it in his eyes where some glint of emotion manipulates the light in a funny trick of angles and shadows. Jack helps Dr. Lecter carry the conversation after that. Will stays silent the whole ride home, speaking only when spoken to.

Bella really starts to worry when they take on a case involving mushrooms that Jack only vaguely tells her about over coffee one rare shared morning in.

“I don’t know that I would have called him ‘fine’ before, but even with Abel Gideon turning his back on him, Will seemed okay. He had Lloyd, Beverly, the team. He was getting on all right, even if it was hard—even if sometimes it was obvious he didn’t want to try.”

“What changed?”

Jack doesn’t know the answer that day. He leaves for work and she to the gym. They see each other the following afternoon, Jack having gotten in late the previous night and having left early that morning.

“The only thing I can think that’s changed is that Freddie Lounds talked to Abel Gideon.”

Bella digs around for herself to find out what that means and finds a whole lot of really compromising stuff. Maybe Freddie Lounds wouldn’t pay heed to it and maybe Jack missed it, but if Will considered Gideon his friend before he killed that nurse, then she could see how the words on the blog would really wound him.

Gideon’s not doing well. Lounds wasn’t pulling any punches either.

He’s a man in abject distress with no idea who he is, and only a short while ago Will based so much of who he was on being able to speak to him and figure out where they were similar, where they were different. Jack told her what it was like watching them converse, how they’d break into multiple unidentifiable languages in a single exchange and burst out laughing like boys afterward—how they carried on like that for hours without losing any momentum.

And in this one brief article he’s cut down to the barest parts—pieces of a shattered mind haphazardly reassembled. Even through the terse, to-the-point language Lounds uses, Bella can read the trauma there. She can read the distrust and the confusion Gideon’s been left with—how it’s basically all he has left to his name anymore. Will can’t help him. Gideon wouldn’t let him, and now Chilton won’t either.

It’s enough to make her weary with a helpless, ugly kind of grief. She can’t imagine where that leaves Will.

She sets about keeping her hands busy while Jack’s newest case takes him out of the house for long periods of time. Her favorite books lay strewn all about the coffee table, read and re-read, and a frightening concoction bubbles over in the kitchen. It’s supposed to be spaghetti, but it’s mostly just an exorcism of boredom. Because it leaves a significantly smaller mess to contend with, she abandons those projects for research into angelic lore, lingering side effects of treated encephalitis, and everything she can find about psychotic breaks in violent subjects.

Jack solves his case somewhere in between her searches on narcissistic personality disorder and two complementary angels called Munkar and Nakir. He looks the way he usually does after an arrest: relaxed, tired, glad.

He tells her a man called Eldon Stammets tried to abduct Abigail Hobbs at the hospital, and the attempted snatch and grab led to his apprehension. Jack mentions the whole thing at all because Will is the one who caught him in the act and shot him, saving the Hobbs girl’s life in the process.

She thinks about telling Jack about the test results, but the words for it don’t come. He has no idea that he needs to ask, so he doesn’t.

At her next session with Dr. Lecter, Bella tells him she’s worried for Will. It’s no secret to anyone, save Will, probably. Whatever’s going on with him lately, he hasn’t wanted to connect with anyone or make those razor sharp judgments that he used to. 

Talking about Will is a convenient multitasking strategy. It allows her to speak about what’s been troubling her while _not_ speaking about the treatment options the oncologist laid out on the table for her. It gives her an out that’s believable and honest without scaring her back from that perilous ledge of uncertainty at which she feels trapped at all times.

But those feelings aren’t confused or unmanageable. Her feelings about Will’s current predicament are manageable but much more confused.

“We’ve tried making our home a safe place for him, but I don’t think he wants it the way he did before.”

“You’re certain he wanted your hospitality prior to falling ill?”

“He acted as if he did,” she says slowly, thinking about Will’s body language and how open he was when Jack first brought him from Louisiana. “I know he’s been through so much lately, and I wouldn’t begrudge anyone for not being at a hundred percent right now given the circumstances.”

Dr. Lecter nods his head. “But Will continues to work.”

“That’s my primary concern—that he shouldn’t be doing this if he isn’t in the right place psychologically, physically…”

“Jack told you of his concerns regarding the encephalitis.” The ends of his mouth pinch into a grimace.

“He got the idea from me,” she corrects him, to which Dr. Lecter tips his chin.

“Collaboration can be such an effective means of gauging the information in our immediate surroundings.”

“Like your collaboration with Will, for instance?”

“That is one example, certainly. I meant Will’s involvement with the FBI. While there’s no way to know for sure what would have happened had he been absent from Eldon Stammets’ situation, Abigail Hobbs may not be in the situation she currently finds herself in.”

“And if he had been absent, would her parents be dead right now?”

She regrets it the second it’s out of her mouth, though she doesn’t mean it in a cruel way. Dr. Lecter understands that she doesn’t, but the guilty feeling lingers in her chest still.

“Would she be?” The crux of arguing with hypotheticals, of course, is that there is no way to know who is right and who is wrong. “I am not at liberty to tell you what Will has shared with me. I only hope that you’ll trust all of us to make the right choices even if Will himself doesn’t.”

The topic drifts away from Will then toward Jack where it stays for a while until she can’t avoid discussing herself any longer. Bella feels okay about most things, apart from the one thing she feels terrified about—and she isn’t ready to speak that into being just yet. It will be much too real when she does.

It feels cruel to tell Dr. Lecter before telling Jack, especially when her mind is already partially made up about how to respond to the oncologist’s inquiry as to treatment. That is to say she doesn’t think there _will_ be treatment—not for wanting death but for wanting life as she has it for as much time as she has left. She can’t fathom life muzzled behind an oxygen mask or confined to her bed taking a dozen pills every few hours while her body wastes away.

All of it will happen, whether she fights it or not.

She senses that there’s more that he wants to say to her at the end of their session, but whatever it is he doesn’t mention it for one reason or another.

Sparing a final parting thought to the cancer, she leaves Dr. Lecter’s office and takes a detour off the freeway rather than staying on it to get home. On a whim, Bella drives to the hospital where they’re keeping Abigail Hobbs. She knows where it is because of the news report detailing the shooting that happened there—Will disarming Stammets, presumably.

He’s not there at first, so she sits in the waiting room, prepared to wait the whole night. He only makes her wait two hours.

“Bella?” he says, brow wrinkled with confusion as he’s stepping off the elevator.

She stands and momentarily loses her train of thought as he’s watching her expectantly. She says, “Hi.”

“Hello.” He frowns.

“I don’t actually know why I’m here.” She shakes her head to clear the murkiness from her mind.

He looks alarmed instantly. “Bella, tell me what you’re feeling right now. Do you know who you are?”

“I’m okay, Will. It’s me.” He doesn’t look completely convinced, but the threat doesn’t appear to bother him either way. “If I weren’t me, why would I be standing here talking with you like I normally do?”

Something serious and awful like horror ripples over Will’s face and he’s running before she can stop him. She tails him but keeps her distance, only staying close enough to know the turns he’s taken. He disappears into the third room on the right and stays there. No one runs in after him except for one alarmed nurse that does check in on him and leaves Bella to scold him in his place.

He’s standing over Abigail Hobbs with his hands covering his face when Bella joins him. She closes the door and doesn’t speak. Will doesn’t either. For a long time they stay right where they are and don’t move except to breathe.

Bella takes stock of the room. It’s empty but for the clinical necessities, such as the tube supplying Abigail Hobbs with oxygen. Will towers over her at full height. Bella doesn’t know how many nights he’s devoted to doing just this or how often he’s had to protect her even in the state she’s in now.

Eldon Stammets was just one man. Man is only one type of predator.

“I’m sorry,” she tells him. It hadn’t even entered into her mind that her presence unannounced would frighten him the way that it did. “I just wanted to talk.”

“We talk at dinner,” Will sighs, dropping himself into the chair behind his knees.

“You think I can’t see that this is hell on you?”

“I don’t pretend that it isn’t,” he replies flatly. “But I can’t stop, and I know you see that, too.”

Bella crosses her arms before her chest, still unsure of what she meant to do here but only knowing that she needed to be here, that she was needed here tonight. Will interpreted that to be a bad thing, but it doesn’t feel like a bad thing in her heart. It feels like intuition crossed with something bordering on superstition. There are a million things she feels like she’s here to say, but that isn’t the right approach. It’s why he’s been silent at dinner. His answers aren’t to be solicited. They’re to be given freely and received.

So she sits on the other side of Abigail Hobbs’ bed and waits. A nurse comes in at one point, notices her, checks Will, and goes about her business as usual. He’s become a staple of this room in all likelihood. It’s incredibly brave, given what he said to her before about his dislike of hospitals.

The machine measuring Abigail’s vitals beeps in the silence.

At length, Will says, “Abel was attacked because of me. I thought sending Lounds to talk to him would help me understand his mind and what’s been done to him.” He shakes his head and takes off his glasses to rub at his eyes. “But it only showed me how much I hurt him just by being in his life.”

 _You cared about him,_ Bella restrains herself from saying. _You never wanted any harm to come to him._

“I’m torn between what I know is right and what I wish could have.”

“What do you mean?”

Will looks up from his hands at Abigail’s heart monitor, tracking each jump and depression in the reading with his eyes. He sighs and turns those jaded eyes on Bella. 

“I snapped at you for bringing up Tenochtitlan the other day. I’m sorry.”

“You’re forgiven.”

He drops his gaze then and rubs his hands together.

“I was chosen because it was known that given enough time, I could catch my prey—no matter how old, how powerful, how evil.”

Bella touches her wedding ring out of a blind, unmarked instinct. Will catalogues the movement and then looks away.

“Lucifer burned too bright. Icarus flew too close to the sun. There’s a reason so many stories exist of powerful beings who lose everything because of their hubris. It’s to warn us that pride comes before the fall. In each of us lies the capacity to meet our demise at the hands of the one thing we know better than anyone else in the world. 

“Ose’s fall _will_ be at my hand, and I want that with all of my being, but…that’s only because I know it’s what I should want—what I would have to be mad not to want after everything I’ve seen and done.”

“Will?”

He takes his time doing it, but he does meet her gaze. The expression on his face is worn, but he doesn’t look tired now. As much as it surprises her, he only looks embarrassed. Shame might actually come closer to the truth of it, to that tense, bewildered set of his mouth.

“What do you really want if that’s not it?”

Will’s frown shivers into a miserable half-smile. His eyes fall closed as his lips part around a whisper of a laugh. He leans forward and rests his forehead on his hands.

“That bounty I bought with my blood.”

The heart monitor beeps around them. Bella feels it in her ribs, in her lungs where the cancer is growing. She feels it in her skin like a second pulse. Will laughs again quietly, shaking his head against his palms and straightening out to reveal cheeks wetted with tears. A quivering smile sits still on his lips.

“Do you understand that a single being will never fall merely because he is corrupted, because he is bent that way from his creation to favor ruin, or because anyone else shapes him to do ill? I didn’t make the choices that I made with him out of some defect of my birth or because it was my destiny to be destroyed. I am here right now as the man that you see before you because I felt desire, and from the moment that I did, I never wanted to go back.”

He covers his forehead with his hand then, leaning back all the way in his seat as if to put distance between them. She can’t think of a word to say to him. There aren’t any, and maybe that’s why he’s been acting so erratically as of late.

And now that he’s told Bella? What does he think she’ll do with it? What _can_ she do but tell Jack?

But he might run from her if she starts there, so she doesn’t start there.

“Will, have you told any of this to Dr. Lecter?”

He gives her a tortured look. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because he…” His breath catches in his throat. “He’s been touched by ḫasīs—from Ose, no less. I couldn’t…we’ve tried to talk about it before, but I always feel dirty for it, like I’m using him.”

Bella stands to her feet and rounds the foot of Abigail’s bed to bring up a chair beside him. He’s careful not to look at her.

She tells him, “If it could help you work through these feelings, I’m sure he’d be happy to help you in whatever capacity he can. I might even look at it as kind of a miracle that it was him. You have doctor-patient confidentiality with him; whatever you say to him while you’re on the clock is sanctified, protected.”

“Whereas this room,” Will says emptily.

“I’m not going to tell Jack what you told me.”

His eyes look gray in the dim lighting of the room. “You aren’t?”

“No, I know when I’m being confided in. I didn’t come here to ambush you so I could report my findings back to Jack. He would never ask me to do that, and I would never agree to it. You need to promise me something, though, Will.”

“What is it?” he asks earnestly, looking like a child again and warming her heart.

“Promise me you won’t keep these things to yourself. Tell Dr. Lecter or Dr. Bloom, or tell me if you don’t feel comfortable going to them. Talk to Lloyd, Beverly, Jack, _someone_. You know what it says about isolation in the bible.”

He gives her a blank look, waiting.

“If you’re on your own then you’re vulnerable to threats from all sides, the physical _and_ the spiritual kind. All right, I’m paraphrasing, but the point is you need people. Don’t you smile at me.”

“The ability to quote scripture is not a prevalent one in these times,” he murmurs with a smaller but still amply amused smile. “But I think you refer to the First Epistle to the Corinthians: the body is not made up of one part but many.”

She hums in agreement, and his smile softens. “The bible also says that if your right eye offends you, it should be plucked out of your skull.”

Bella deadpans, “It’s your eye, not mine.”

“The bad must be taken with the good,” he replies, voice light and gentle. “We know all things are black and white, equally. All that’s different is how much of the black we see or how much we don’t.”

They sit in the quiet of the room then with the machines whirring automated breath and mimicking a heartbeat—an entire life reduced to bells and whistles. Hopefully it isn’t for much longer. Abigail Hobbs fell asleep fighting for her life. She should wake up the same way and live the life stretching before her like an unclaimed and unseen abyss.

“If you keep going at this rate you’re going to burn yourself out, Will.”

“It’s the cost of passion,” he says, slipping his glasses onto his face and running a lazy hand through his hair. “I can only hope to take him with me when I do.”

She hopes he’ll do that, too, regardless of whatever else he decides. If he chooses destruction or if he chooses duty, it’s entirely on him. She could go back on her word and try to direct his path, but she won’t. It’s in him to follow desire to the ends of the earth and die clutching it to his chest, and it’s in him to eradicate the cause of that passion that’s upended every single area of his life for hundreds of years.

Either way he’ll be consumed by it, but so will the master of the flames burning him now. Bella can’t stop him. It sinks in slowly that Jack can’t either. He’d said as much to her the night she met Will. He told her something was coming for Will and that all he can do for his part is facilitate the meeting.

Bella can’t make this stop any more than she can make the cancer spreading within her body stop.

She’d opted not to do the chemo, not to suffer horrible, wrenching pains just for the chance of maybe living without the thing growing inside her. She had decided that it would be better to die with it than suffer the pain of fighting it, and she can’t expect Will to choose differently. She would never ask him to choose differently when she herself can’t.

He angles his head toward her when she sighs but doesn’t take his eyes off Abigail’s hand where it lies near the edge of the bed. It appears to be in his reach, but he makes no move to take it.

“Could I tell you something very secret, Will?”

He does look at her then, eyes serious as the grave but instantly worried. She doesn’t know what she ever did to deserve the loyalty behind that focused, stern gaze. Without speaking or moving, he conveys that his answer is a firm yes.

“You promise not to tell anyone? Not even Dr. Lecter.”

“Yes.”

“Without even knowing what it is?”

The corners of his mouth twitch. “I confessed to an evil dream, and you gave me your word that you’ll keep it between us. I promise, Bella.”

She looks down at her hands in her lap then and twists the band on her finger, watching the light bounce off the gold given to her something like half her life ago. Will looks sad when she brings her gaze back to his, but for a long time she can’t speak.

He waits until she can.

She opens her mouth to give him those words—a secret traded for a secret, but before she can finish there’s a noise stirring in the room with them. They both freeze, half of her confession committed to speech and enough that Will knows it for all that it is.

It’s all they have time for. Abigail Hobbs thrashes awake beside them, panicked and struggling around the tube that is now choking her. Will tries to help, but she screams at the sight of him, the frantic sound muffled around the obstruction lodged in her throat. He presses the Call button and waits by the door until a member of the staff comes to attend to her and explain what’s happened.

There’s nothing to say here either. Bella can see that his heart’s just been broken twice in the span of a minute.

“Give her time,” she says, not pausing for the hitch in her voice. 

Will’s eyes shine with tears and he grimaces. “Time.”

That time is life and a death sentence wrapped in one.

She tells him, “It’ll be okay.”

He nods and doesn’t say a word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ḫasīs – comprehension, wisdom (Emesal)
> 
> From 1 Corinthians 12:14 – “Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many.”
> 
> From Matthew 5:29 – “If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.”


	4. I Could Never Be Ashamed of You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _All the happiness I’ve ever known came the day you said you’d be my own / And it matters not what we go through darling I could never be ashamed of you / Maybe you’ve been cheated in the past and perhaps those memories will always last / Even though you prove to be untrue darling I could never be ashamed of you_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Upon waking in the hospital, Abigail dreams and remembers troubling things about her father and the men who saved her from him.

There was noise sometimes, when he’d kill the girls. Abigail usually wasn’t there as it was happening, but every once in a while he’d like her to be within earshot. She’d hear them pleading with him just before he strangled them to death, and on one occasion she’d heard the knife plunge through lifeless flesh. She couldn’t keep her lunch from resurfacing, and he’d been annoyed, but it hadn’t stopped him from finishing the job he set out to do.

It was so much like hunting. It _was_ a hunt.

Hours before, she’d been talking to them, exchanging names with them, and sharing communal space with them. She met them on trains, in coffee shops, just walking around college campuses…

His victims. Their prey.

Her father always cut them up, but she was every bit the butcher that he was. Only now that he’s dead, there’s just her left. He _was_ a murderer, but she still is. She always will be.

The dry smell of the starched pillow case beneath her head reminds her of this fact when she wakes with her hair tangled across her face and stuck to the back of her neck. It’s maybe the fourth morning that she’s been here. She asks if the other man is still there—the one who was standing over when she woke up. Since she screamed at him to leave he hasn’t been back.

Abigail searches for guilt to associate with his absence, but there is none. She’s just exhausted. Getting up and running might make that other weight in her chest dissipate, but the conversation happening around her doesn’t let her have any misconceptions about where she’s going as soon as they discharge her.

Jack Crawford is the only one who talks to her at first. Abigail decides she needs to steer clear of him. He suspects her, and it’s obvious, even if he doesn’t say anything to even suggest what he really thinks of her.

He’d have to be foolish to trust her on sight. Even if her father did nearly kill her, it always comes back to one question: How could she not have known?

People always say that when their closest friends, family, or even their spouses turn out to be serial killers. They cry modest little horrified tears for the press, and they say how good things were—how they didn’t have the slightest idea as to what was happening right under their noses.

Abigail doesn’t say all of that. When asked, she tells Jack Crawford she didn’t know. That’s as flowery as her interaction with him gets.

On this fourth morning, Jack Crawford comes with back-up to her hospital room. Abigail’s neck aches where the bandages push against her skin as though they’re made out of lead. It’s psychological, most likely. She hasn’t been able to stop her mind from going there since she’s been awake. One evening with dinner a nurse caught her fussing with it and politely instructed her to stop.

She wants to go home, but she has no home anymore. There’s no one looking out for her—no one standing by to tell her it’s all right.

Jack Crawford’s associate, Dr. Bloom, acts as if she _does_ care, but Abigail doesn’t buy it immediately. She plans to be Abigail’s psychiatrist, and that kind of arrangement will never yield equality between them. Dr. Bloom will never be Abigail’s friend.

There’s no exploiting a doctor-patient relationship. At least, she doesn’t anticipate that it will be as clear-cut as exploiting a friendship would be.

It’s not to nurture a pessimistic outlook that she entertains these plans but for necessity’s sake. Her only way out of this system that will never let her go once the truth of her is proven is manipulation. Abigail isn’t weak and she’s not heartless, but she is desperate.

Dr. Bloom has a kind smile. It won’t be the most difficult task she’s ever set out to do.

They don’t talk therapy at first. It’s a slow game of testing the waters, and Abigail appreciates it for what it is because she has no other choice. No one spills their guts all at once for nothing. Like anyone else, Abigail must make Dr. Bloom wait for the bad stuff. It’s a rational defense mechanism and a means of stalling and a way to build suspense. This whole thing is an act, and everyone fills a unique, inseparable part. 

Their second actual meeting yields a bit more. It’s conducted in her room at Port Haven. Abigail’s still wearing her hospital gown and very conspicuous bandages around her neck.

Abigail talks about her mom being dead. Her father is too dangerous a subject to throw him out there for dissection first, and anyway, Abigail hasn’t chosen how she’s going to handle talking about him in this setting. She already told Jack Crawford about the hunting trips, the cabin, how her parents never really fought except for one huge argument last year, and that she didn’t suspect anything was off with him the way that everything was.

Dr. Bloom leads their conversation and drives them to that argument. Maybe she heard about it from Jack Crawford, or maybe Abigail just set it up that way without realizing. Either way she needs to be careful about what information she leeches out onto other people.

Only a portion of the reality can ever see the light of day—and only a portion of what she saw that morning in the kitchen when her parents were killed can break the surface. Not all of the facts make sense. Even what she observed of her father the few times she really _saw_ him were all wrong. Beyond just the fact of the generic immorality of his actions, the reasoning for it all struck her as nearly incomprehensible.

He’d told her once it was the only way he could keep from killing her. He said maybe if he took from those girls that looked enough like her to please him what he couldn’t bear to take from her, maybe…

But he never said what it was he thought he was taking from them. Her first terrible fear was that he meant sex, but she quickly ruled it out when she saw that he didn’t violate them or their bodies at any point in the murders. That was a relief, but it didn’t change or solve anything. It only meant that he would continue to kill others until he succumbed to whatever beast had grown in him. When that happened, and she always believed it would eventually, he would finally lose all reservations about saving her and kill her instead.

It was wishful thinking to believe that college would provide them both an escape from that inevitability. Abigail doesn’t expect to have many more chances to do so, but she won’t make that mistake again.

In regards to the argument, Abigail keeps it simple. Her parents had argued over where Abigail should go for college since that time was coming up soon.

Her father wanted her to stay close to home, and her mother said she should apply all over and pick the best place. Louise Hobbs believed in her daughter’s ability to soar, but then, so did Garret Jacob Hobbs, no matter how much more sinister his opinion of her was.

“Did you agree with one of them over the other?” Dr. Bloom asks, crossing her legs.

“My mom.” Abigail shrugs, looking out the window as she crosses one leg over her knee. “I didn’t want to stay in Minnesota.”

“Where did you want to go?”

“I thought California would be nice,” Abigail confesses somewhat shyly. “I know everyone wants to go to California, but it just sounded like it’d be better than home.”

“What drew you to it?”

“The smog and the palm trees,” Abigail says with a small smile. “The terrible traffic, the beaches, the music scene, I don’t know. It’s a different world than here—or, different from Minnesota, at least.”

She forgets often that they’ve brought her to Baltimore. It makes some sense, if she’s being generous. They’re investigating her father; she’s the only one left to tell them anything about what happened. When they’d brought her here she’d been in a coma.

“But I only applied to in-state schools,” Abigail says, counter to her previous statement about California. “He helped me with all the applications, so he knew where I was applying, and…”

And they couldn’t discreetly tour California schools and pick off the brown-haired, blue-eyed female population, not by a long shot.

“Is Will Graham a detective?” she asks out of nowhere, quite obviously surprising Dr. Bloom.

“He’s a consultant. Jack Crawford brought him onto your father’s case.”

“Why him? Is he a hunting specialist?”

“He’s a teacher. He’s worked with the FBI in the past.”

Abigail nods and says, “He hasn’t come back since I woke up.”

“He hasn’t wanted to upset you,” Dr. Bloom replies in the same soft tone of voice that Abigail’s adopted.

“Now that I understand where I am, I don’t think I would react like I did at first.”

Dr. Bloom studies Abigail solemnly for a few seconds and says, “You screamed when you saw him in your room.”

Abigail swallows hard. She hadn’t gone into the question expecting to be asked about that.

“He shot my dad. He shot him, I don’t even know how many times. When I was lying on the floor, bleeding, he was crouched over me covered in it, shaking.” She looks down and relaxes her tightly clasped hands in her lap. “And then I wake up in a dark room with a tube shoved down my throat. He looks exactly like he did in my house where everything happened, just less bloody.”

Dr. Bloom looks guilty after that, like she perhaps had considered this possibility as an obvious answer but needed to ask regardless. She isn’t against the idea of bringing Will Graham in to speak with Abigail when she asks. Abigail supposes it might be expected to bring her some closure. Abigail hopes it will, in whatever small way that it can.

While she’s waiting in her room to meet him for the third time, someone else comes in to speak with her—a woman. She identifies herself as Freddie Lounds and says she’d love to talk to Abigail about what happened to her sometime. She says she’s a writer.

She also says, “I know you’re going to be thrown into his path again, so I need to tell you before he comes here to talk to you. You can’t trust Will Graham.”

“What?”

“I have it on good authority that he’s not who he says he is. I confess, I don’t know what it means, but I do know that he’s caused a lot of suffering since he’s come to work for the FBI. If you ever have doubts about him or if he expects you to believe a word he says, just ask him about Abel Gideon.”

“I—”

Just then the door opens to reveal Will Graham and the other man who was with him after her father was shot dead. She’s staring blankly at him when Will essentially kicks Freddie out, mumbling something under his breath about ‘lying shit’ that actually makes Abigail blush because it sounds strange to hear him utter a swear word.

Freddie Lounds looks incongruously pleased to get a rise out of him. The other man in the room keeps his expression neutral, but Abigail likes to think he’s not as impressed with Will’s words as Abigail is.

“Keep away from her,” she hears Will warn from this side of the door while Freddie’s stepping out.

“That’s up to Abigail to decide, Mr. Graham.”

And then she leaves, and Abigail doesn’t know what to do with herself.

“I’m sorry,” Will says in a voice that’s completely different from the one he used to speak to Freddie Lounds. “She’s like a shadow that I can’t shake.”

“A necessary evil then?” Abigail asks, searching still for her footing and not finding it so easily.

“You could make a case for her, and I’d listen,” he cedes, sounding surprisingly, wholeheartedly genuine. 

She darts a look at the man standing behind Will Graham, almost like a different kind of shadow cast up along the opposite wall. He’s taller and to Will’s right. Abigail tries to decide which one between the two of them might be the shadow of the other.

Following her gaze, Will says, “This is Dr. Hannibal Lecter.”

“Hello, Abigail.”

“I remember you,” she says, the voice triggering a memory all too immediately. Her heart hammers behind her ribs, and she adds, “You stopped the bleeding. How did you do that?”

Will turns to look at Dr. Lecter, too, like he very much wishes to hear him explain.

“I used to be an emergency room surgeon.”

“So are you a consultant like Will?”

“I am a psychiatrist. While I do provide some insight and tag along on certain cases, my first and foremost function is that of a doctor.”

“Mine,” Will says offhandedly, without an ounce of shame to the admission. “Among others.”

“Yes,” Dr. Lecter confirms, nodding his head once.

“Why aren’t you my doctor, too?” Abigail asks, sitting up and fidgeting too much with the blankets.

“There was a conflict of interest, I’m afraid, but Dr. Bloom is extremely capable. You’re in very good hands.”

“You’re safe now,” Will Graham tells her when she has no response to Dr. Lecter’s faith in Dr. Bloom’s competency. “No one’s going to hurt you.”

She nods absently and stares out the window.

“I know it’s too late for that to mean anything, but…” Will averts his eyes when she turns to look at him, a muscle in his jaw twitching. “I’ve let a lot of people down by now. I won’t let anything else happen to you.”

Dr. Lecter takes a slow, silent step closer to Will that the latter doesn’t notice. Abigail watches the two of them standing almost side by side and frowns. They hadn’t been side by side when Will stormed into the house. Maybe he was meant to clear the way for Dr. Lecter so only one of them would be in immediate danger, but the time it took for him to rejoin them in the kitchen…

“Did you see my mother die?” she asks them both jointly.

Will nods yes, and Dr. Lecter says as much.

“I’m sorry, Abigail,” Will adds, still the bleeding heart that Abigail flagged him to be from their very first encounter. The look in his eyes then manifests to a much smaller extent now.

Whatever her father wanted to kill in her, Will knows what it is. She trusts him to know. Unable to define whence her conviction comes, she asks a much simpler question instead: “Why am I under investigation?”

“There’s someone else involved,” Will says, chilling Abigail’s blood instantaneously. “Your father knew we were coming, so we have to work under the assumption that someone tipped him off.”

Uncertain, Abigail asks, “…Me?”

“No, Abigail.” His inflection sells her on how ridiculous the mere thought of her being the culprit is to him. “Do you remember anyone coming by the house? Maybe your father received a call or a text before we got there?”

Abigail very resolutely does not look at Dr. Lecter who’s watching both of them quietly. She squeaks, “Someone called the house.”

Will sighs, nods, and drops his chin forward onto his chest. He removes his glasses and rubs at his eyes, and Abigail stares down at her lap. With his glasses pushed back up the bridge of his nose, he asks her, “Could you identify the person’s voice?”

“I barely paid any attention to it when it happened,” she says, pulling every fiber of control in her body to the regulation of her voice. “I think it was a man, maybe?”

He just nods, eyes completely sympathetic and remorseful. She can tell by looking at him that he didn’t like killing her dad—or at the very least, he hates to be the one to have done it. She doesn’t know which would be worse: if his guilt was for the murder of a far more guilty man or if his guilt is that she’ll always see him as the man that shot and killed her father. The second possibility places a lot of expectation on her—a lot of responsibility she isn’t sure she can handle. She certainly doesn’t deserve it from him. They’re strangers.

As unfortunate as it is for both of them, they’re equally stained by her father’s death. No matter the horrors to which he exposed her, his hands that took so many lives were the same hands that loved her mother, held Abigail when she was just a baby, taught her to hunt, made breakfast every morning, showed her how to pop a clutch…

Will’s hands stilled them forever. Dr. Lecter’s hands salvaged an already-wrecked situation—he saved her life.

Abigail keeps herself distanced from each of them, for now. She’s already arrived at the conclusion that taking advantage of a friend in her precarious situation would be more beneficial than trying to manipulate Dr. Bloom.

But if she could manipulate a different doctor of equal if not elevated repute? If she could coin him for a friend—someone with intelligence and bearing more of the Bureau’s backing than even their prized consultant who wears his heart on his sleeve? The same one who appears to have imprinted on her or at the very least, wants to shelter her from any and all bad things that come to call on her.

And that’s what he is, isn’t he? Will Graham isn’t a specialist in any field. He’s a _teacher_. She saw him aim true and pull the trigger with practiced ease, but he’d looked terrified. Anybody can learn to shoot, but she can’t outrun the suspicion that he might be a failed cop.

Of course, there’s also Freddie Lounds harping on in the back of her mind about someone called Abel Gideon. There’s a story there, and probably if she asked right now, Will would tell her everything merely because she asked. There’s no immediate nagging desire to do it now. It wouldn’t be fair to him. Just like Dr. Bloom will have to wait for her to deem herself ready for certain conversations, Will Graham will have to wait, too.

Even if she wants it all revealed and in the open now, it’s not how relationships work. The relationships she needs now coax, linger in longs bouts of disorganization, and collide into being. Just like her father had her bait those girls he killed, Abigail needs to be the lure one more time.

She looks at Will Graham and sees someone scrambling for purchase in an ever-shifting, uneven territory. She looks at Dr. Lecter and sees someone who doesn’t need to speak to command respect or authority. He isn’t a shadow on the wall but an entity of presence. If he so liked, Abigail would wager that he could make anyone else occupying the same space as him look totally irrelevant.

He doesn’t do it to Will Graham. He lets him have the floor, lets him pause to find his words, and stays behind him or at his side but never in front of him. Dr. Lecter is playing the waiting game just like Abigail is. He’s every bit the enchanter that Abigail aspires to be for the sole purpose of self-preservation, which has her silently questioning Dr. Lecter’s motivations and whether they’re as utilitarian as her own.

“How did you find him?” she asks after a while when they’ve all been comfortably silent long enough.

Will Graham tells her about metal shavings that were found on Elise Nichols’ body, her corpse being the only one her father ever put back. He says they’re looking into other unsolved disappearances to prove whether he killed them in addition to Nichols, but there’s nothing they’ve found to solidify their theories as to her father’s responsibility.

Abigail doesn’t tell them that they won’t find any no matter where they look for it. He treated each of his kills the same, whether they were deer or human—with the utmost respect.

His way to honor them was to use their parts. Not a single shred of them would go to waste.

It’s vulgar to think about her mother hurriedly slashed open on the front step of their house. The complete lack of honor and ceremony there when her death should have been the most reverent of all, disturbs Abigail at a very base, primal level. Whatever existed in Abigail that he wanted to destroy, either he blamed it on Louise or he knew that killing her contributed nothing to what he was trying to accomplish with the other murders.

“Do you have any leads on who the guy might be? The one who called the house,” she clarifies.

“Not yet,” Will says, sounding palpably disappointed. “It’s an ongoing investigation.”

That’s definitely police-speak for ‘end of discussion,’ so she leaves it alone. It’s not the end of it, though. Dr. Bloom informs her of a dead girl named Cassie Boyle who was found just a short while before the FBI closed in on her father.

Abigail doesn’t pursue that line of questioning. She can’t have the discussion point toward her.

Jack Crawford has other ideas, though. He decides some time later that it would be good to take her on a fieldtrip of sorts back to Minnesota where everything happened. It makes her nauseous being back on that driveway where the word ‘CANNIBALS’ has been spray painted on the garage door.

There’s a bloodstain on the front porch where her mother presumably bled out. Will Graham had come in with blood on his hands, and she only just connects the dots as they’re walking inside.

“You tried to save her, too,” she tells him in the manner of one telling a precious secret.

He says, looking devastated but getting a hold of himself fairly quickly, “I tried.”

They walk through the house, and Abigail really can’t fathom what they thought they were going to achieve by bringing her back here. Did Jack Crawford think she’d get the old scent back and slip into hysterics, raving all about how her father forced her to do things she’ll never be cleared of?

While going back over the details of the case, Will and Dr. Bloom share with her that they think the person who called the house may have killed that girl, Cassie Boyle. They always suspected it wasn’t her father’s handiwork but that of a copycat, and they aim to jog Abigail’s memory by having her go over that morning again.

Dr. Lecter stands off to the side looking at everything with a subtle kind of amusement that Abigail just about balks at, though she struggles not to show it.

They think this guy is a serial killer?

That makes just about as much sense as what she thought she saw right as her father went thrashing down in a hail of bullets. Abigail knows a lot about being in the wrong place at the wrong time for questionable reasons. She’s not going to jump to any kind of conclusion about anyone just because one explanation makes more sense than another.

Although when Dr. Lecter had walked into the kitchen, she could have sworn she saw him looking up…at…

She makes a bold decision to call him out in front of Dr. Bloom and Will, though she and Dr. Lecter are the only two that catch the subtlety of it. His eyes affix to hers, and something passes over him like _cold_ and little else.

But she’s brave, and she handled her father for months before they found and put an end to him. Freddie Lounds told her not to trust Will Graham, and as far as Abigail can tell, _everyone_ trusts Dr. Lecter. There’s a frisson of truth somewhere in that jumble of false advertising that Abigail means to cipher at one point or another.

Dr. Bloom and Will carry on in an interpretation of events while Dr. Lecter stares at her. He himself opens up to be watched likewise by Abigail. He’s gauging what she thinks she knows. He’s trying to discern how much of a threat she is to his safety.

She hasn’t chosen which one of them to latch onto, but she _had_ had her eye on Will. He’s already so attached to her, it wouldn’t take much to win him over to her side, but Dr. Lecter’s caught in this the same way she’s caught. They’re stuck in it together, and now he knows they are. She can keep what she knows to herself. He has to let her.

The question is whether she’ll protect him the way Will promised _he_ would.

Wrong place, wrong time, questionable reasons…

She tries to communicate that she’s getting a feel for him in the same way that he is for her. He looks like he accepts it. There’s no other choice with their present company in attendance.

Her reprieve from the FBI comes in the way of Marissa catching wind of her return. She’s a welcome sight. Abigail doesn’t have to lie to her so much as withhold from her the full truth. It’s an easy trade. 

Marissa comforts her, tells Abigail she believes in her, and lets it be known in no uncertain terms will anyone change her mind about their friendship. She’s fiercely protective and vocal where Abigail has never been and—Abigail hates herself for noticing—probably would have been one of her father’s victims if Marissa had ever been at one of those colleges upon which they hunted. 

He must have looked at Marissa often with her dark hair and bright eyes and thought, _Yes, her next_.

Only he couldn’t. Marissa was too close to home. If she disappeared the police might question Abigail about her last known whereabouts. The FBI already had other suspected victims—they wouldn’t share with her, but Abigail trusts they have most if not all of them pinned to their walls with little red lines connecting them to respective college campuses to find where the evidence intersects.

“Does that hurt at all?” Marissa asks when they’re alone.

“Not always.”

Marissa nods, not looking at Abigail for a few seconds but then looking right at her. “Everyone went crazy when they found out. People from school, the neighborhood…everyone jumped at the chance to talk to the reporters about you.”

Abigail worries her lip with her teeth.

Marissa rolls her eyes and says, “Whores.”

“Did you talk to them?” Abigail asks softly, trying not to care about the answer, whatever it might be.

“No, of course not.” Marissa’s shoulders slump. “My mom would have had a cow. She doesn’t even want me talking to you, but I had to come.”

Suspicious but not wanting to push it, Abigail says, “I’m surprised you’d listen to her at all. That’s not like you.”

_Maybe you even talked to the reporters, just to spite her. They would have wanted your testimony most of all. Best friend to the Killer Cannibal daughter._

“Everyone thinks you did it, you know,” Marissa says.

Fear pricks cold in Abigail’s heart at the sentiment she’s already perfectly aware of.

“Do you?”

“I don’t think you’re the type, honestly, but then again, that’s what everyone says about people who turn out to be serial killers, right? Your dad didn’t strike me as a homicidal cannibal; I guess you wouldn’t either.”

Abigail stares for a moment and then drops her gaze, unsure of where she stands with Marissa if she has these doubts about her. Maybe what she’d said earlier was just a way to persuade Abigail to let her close. Maybe she lied through her teeth about their friendship for the chance to peek behind the curtain for herself.

“I _don’t_ think you did it,” Marissa says, but the damage has been done. She definitely suspects something, even if she can’t put a name to what it is yet.

They’re behind the house when someone approaches them. Abigail panics and tells him he’s trespassing. He accuses her of the exact truth of her situation. He calls her the lure. He asks if she talked to his sister before her father killed her. She can’t even articulate the words to tell him that her father didn’t kill Cassie Boyle—that she’s never met anyone by that name, not ever. 

Marissa, more than Abigail, keeps her cool—actually throws rocks at the poor man. Abigail sympathizes with him anyway since it’s a mystery to both of them who killed his sister, but Marissa happens to be a great shot, which isn’t great for Cassie Boyle’s brother.

Will and Dr. Lecter see him running off, face bloodied where the rock hit him, and Abigail tells them who he said he was. More accurately, she tells them who he said his sister was.

Dr. Lecter looks intrigued, but Will just frowns a lot and doesn’t say anything. Marissa’s mother comes to collect her, visibly horrified to see Abigail at her side and doing nothing to hide her apparently very low opinion of her. She gets it; really, she does. At the very least, Abigail probably ate people—to their knowledge. At the worst, she’s every bit the monster her father was. Marissa’s mother just wants to protect her.

She’s prepared for Marissa to resist the command her mother issues for her to go home. Abigail is more surprised that in front of both Will and Dr. Lecter both, she calls her a bitch. Her ears ring for a solid ten seconds, but she hears herself exclaiming, “Marissa!”

Her expression is repentant, but she doesn’t aim that look at her mother. She points it solely at Abigail. It says that she’d stay if she could. Even if they were getting close to something like an interrogation before Boyle showed up, Abigail misses Marissa as soon as she’s gone. She’s left alone with the FBI and her soiled childhood home where everyone knows what her life has devolved into.

They go to the cabin the very next morning. Something cold drips from the floorboards upstairs and gets on Abigail’s face. She sees the red on her fingers and forgets how to breathe.

Dread turns in her stomach straight away, but she can’t even form a coherent thought until her legs carry her without her permission to the stairs a few seconds after Will. Dr. Bloom shouts after her, but she can’t help it that she runs. She knows what she’ll see. Somehow it’s in her heart—that prophecy she made before that if it had just been feasible, if it wouldn’t have ended the game too soon, her father would have done to Marissa what he did to those other girls.

She sees Will reaching out to lift the dead girl’s head, and then she sees dark hair and blood and tines. She sees Marissa impaled with her arms out to the side like Christ on the cross.

Abigail screams her name like it will reverse everything if Marissa can just hear her calling after her. Nothing reverses. It all stays just the same as it will always be from now until the end of time. Marissa’s mother was right to fear for her daughter’s safety. Whoever did this to her friend, Abigail is responsible. If she had just stayed away, she would be alive. All those girls would be alive, and Abigail would be dead.

Her mother would be alive, and her father, too. He wouldn’t have been afraid of that thing he said he saw in her—some vaguely evil but overall ambiguous thing that was there one minute and then gone before she ever understood what he’d seen.

So many would be alive and blissfully ignorant of this pain—this horrible grief—if she had just died. No one will believe she’s innocent after this, not even if she’s never convicted.

They’re at the house again that night, and the press has come back with a vengeance. Abigail’s taken toward the house, but there are just so many of them taking pictures, yelling jumbled and unintelligible questions. Above them all, she hears Elaine screaming, voice clear like a bell, “You killed my daughter!”

She charges through the crowd to lunge at Abigail, but Dr. Lecter catches her and holds her through it as she wails miserably. Abigail fights the urge to vomit. She’d have fallen if Dr. Bloom wasn’t holding her up.

She pinpoints a familiar face in the crowd, that of Freddie Lounds. Seen, and aware of it, she makes a beeline for Abigail and drops another offer to tell her story. Abigail tries to agree. She tries to say that’s what she wants. Dr. Bloom hauls her away while Dr. Lecter breaks away from Elaine to have a word with Freddie Lounds. Abigail can’t hear them over the roar of noise around them.

The rest happens in a fog. She’s sitting on the couch in the living room holding a pillow in her lap, stroking the soft cover of it, half-imagining it to be a small, affectionate animal that cares infinitely and unconditionally about her wellbeing. It’s as she’s mourning but also taking great comfort in the fact that they never had any pets that a thought flutters into her mind unbidden.

Just like tearing into a deer’s stomach, she takes a hunting knife out of the same box where the pillow was stashed and perforates a straight line in the side of the pillow. Abigail takes a deep breath, sets the knife down, and plunges her hand slowly inside, remembering smooth, wet warmth from the various times she’d gutted the deer she and her father killed on any given day. Her fingers sink into softness, thready and coiled but coarse when rubbed together between her fingers. She pulls out a clump of dark, straight hair and her stomach falls through the floor.

In an instant she alerts to someone behind her. She jerks around to see him staring at the hair in her hand and having some revelatory epiphany while she hyperventilates around concurrent repulsion and icy, awful fear. 

Boyle.

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” he says slowly, showing his hands and raising his gaze from the human hair to her eyes.

Bull-fucking-shit.

Abigail’s up and on her feet before she can think twice about it, flinging the hair from her hand as she goes. He catches her as she’s attempting to escape him and slams her by her shoulders into the wall at her back. Her frame clatters with it, heart pounding in her ears and lungs only dragging more helplessly on the oxygen in the room.

But her hand doesn’t shake as she forces the knife into him at a familiar enough place that she’s parted with steel before. He looks down, shocked. His expression is almost wholly shocked and nothing else.

He falls, taking the knife with him as his body hits the hardwood floor. Her hands are red. He dies without any kind of fanfare—just stops breathing, and that’s it.

It’s more than her mother got. He didn’t suffer beyond the initial sting. Her aim had been true.

She walks to the stairs, hears someone call her name from very far away, and then snaps out of her daze at the sound of a hard and fast _thud_ just outside of her view. Dr. Lecter is there knelt at Dr. Bloom’s side, laying her head down and brushing his hand over the hair fanned across her face.

Abigail stares at him, not for the first time and probably not for the last. He stands to full height, and she continues to stare at Dr. Bloom’s unconscious face.

“Abigail.”

She looks up at him, ears ringing and heart juddering in her chest.

“Show me what happened.”

They walk together to the body. Dr. Lecter remains largely unfazed by all of it. She tells him it was self-defense, barely believing it but needing to cling to the excuse anyway.

He promptly tells her it wasn’t self-defense, and she gives him a betrayed look, verging on indignant. She tells him, distraught now with nerves and horror at herself: “I didn’t kill him for fun. He snuck in here asking about his sister, I panicked, he threw me against the wall, and I—I had the knife in my hand. I was protecting myself.”

He assesses her face, looks at her hands, and then looks again at the body of Nicholas Boyle.

“Consider your murdered friend, Abigail,” he says slowly. “This man’s skin was found in her teeth. Are you so sure you didn’t kill him out of retribution for her?”

“I…I wouldn’t do that. No, I’m…”

“Jack Crawford wishes to find you guilty. When he sees what you’ve done to Nicholas Boyle, he won’t hesitate to brand you as the same caliber of killer that your father was. They will say you helped him commit his crimes.”

He turns to her and his eyes bore into hers, seeing everything and giving her nothing of himself in return. She opens her mouth to protest, but they both know it to be futile to pretend that he doesn’t see in her what she sees in him. 

“It was you on the phone,” she says.

“Yes,” he says in a clipped but soft tone. “I will tell you whatever you wish to know about it when we aren’t in so dangerous a predicament.”

“You mean when Crawford takes me into custody?” she asks in a watery voice.

“I mean after we’ve removed the body.”

“What?”

“These are your options, Abigail. We can get rid of the body, or we can tell Jack the truth. At great risk to myself—my career and my life—I will help you. Will you let me help you?”

She nods yes wordlessly. There aren’t any objections left to make.

He gives her direction; he tells her to wash her hands and then instructs her to scratch deep trenches in Boyle’s cheek with her nails. He takes the body out of the house, leaving her for a long time with dead skin heaped up under her fingernails and a line of blood running down her wrist. The gathered cells under her nails are thick like scabs she needs to pick. When she looks she can barely see anything there, but it steadily drives her crazy.

She stares at the loose net of hair on the floor by the couch to distract herself. When he returns what feels like a long time later, he presses a clock from the mantel piece into her hands.

“From over your head,” he tells her.

She breaks the clock over the back of his head while standing on her toes and watches the gears explode from their wooden haven. He staggers, but he doesn’t fall. She understands his request even as she drops the clock and hands him back his gloves.

They drive ‘back to the hotel’ after Dr. Bloom has woken up and Jack Crawford has been read in on the goings-on. Dr. Lecter makes good on his word and tells her why he can’t let Jack Crawford or Will know that he was the voice on the phone. It would look too much like a declaration of guilt in their eyes.

“They already have their ideas about who that phone call makes me,” he explains.

She drones, “Like Jack Crawford already has an idea of who my father made me.”

“Yes,” he says, serious eyes locking onto her own. “We are not the sum of our circumstances. Evidence can condemn a guilty man just as effortlessly as it can an innocent one. It happens all every day.”

He doesn’t speak as if he has a body in the trunk of his car or a murderer in the passenger’s seat.

“I’ll keep your secret,” he says, turning those dark shining eyes back to the road. The car breaks for the left to stay on the freeway. She watches the hotel’s exit pass them up outside the window.

This, even if it isn’t how she wanted it, is exactly what she needed of him. She wonders if he didn’t keep his hand hidden for precisely this moment. He needs her protection every bit as much as she needs his. His demeanor doesn’t shift, but she can sense his expectant tension in the silence.

“And I’ll keep yours.”

He smiles small at the promise. Maybe he can hear how much it means to her for him to need anything from her. It’s a safety net. It’s insurance. It goes both ways.

In the quiet darkness that is his spacious car, Abigail sinks into her seat and closes her eyes. Flashes of that morning with her father spark persistently across her eyelids. She ruminates over that shadow she thought she’d hallucinated as the blood rushed out of her in spurts. It was black and made of smoke, but it was less tangible than even that. Somehow it grinned at her—even looked a little bit like her, despite its absolute lack of definable physical traits.

She sits up and looks at Dr. Lecter, seeing him in her mind’s eye at that moment that he walked into the room. His eyes had been up. He’d seen it. 

Didn’t he see it?

“That day, when it all happened…”

Dr. Lecter hums questioningly when she doesn’t continue. He keeps his eyes on the road.

Abigail takes a deep, steadying breath and asks him, “Did you see it?”

A small, soft pause cuts between them. He shoots her a quick, expectant glance. “Did I see what?”

“The…” She sighs, rubbing the back of her hand across her forehead. “Never mind.”

Dr. Lecter looks at her again, and they pass up another exit. He takes the next one and pulls over in a residential neighborhood near a gas station. The nearest streetlight is behind them, leaving them enshrouded still in shadow.

“Did I see what?” he asks again, voice gone low, gentle, and soothing.

“I don’t know. It just looked like…I thought I was seeing things, but it looked like there was something there, by my dad. Over him, holding him up, moving him like—like you might move a doll.”

His mouth remains relaxed but unsmiling. He searches her eyes and then turns to face forward again.

“Do you believe in ghosts, Abigail?”

She blinks at him. “What does that have to do with anything?”

He ignores her question and presses on. “Angels? Demons, perhaps?”

“Look, just forget it,” she spits at him, trying to hide how her painfully heart squeezes at his taunts disguised as well-meaning inquiries. She rolls her eyes at herself for being so easily wounded. “I lost a lot of blood by that point. I was afraid and delusional—dying.”

Dr. Lecter continues to give her a steady, serious look that makes her feel like running. Before she can ask him if he really means it or if he’s teasing her like she thinks he is, he starts the car and takes them back onto the freeway.

“If I told you that what you saw was very real, would you feel better for the journey you’ve made thus far?”

Would she?

Ghosts, meaning that every dead girl her father killed could haunt her beyond just the realm of her dreams. Angels, meaning that there’s a force in the universe that could have stopped her father’s wrath but that elected to stay silent instead. Demons, meaning that there are worse things in the world than madness, than evil, than coercion, than cages…

She says, “No.”

“Then what do you feel?” he asks, curiosity riding heavily on the waves of his accent.

Abigail looks at him, wondering. He holds her gaze briefly and then focuses his eyes back on the road. She whispers, “I’m scared.”

“You needn’t be,” he says easily. “Aren’t we frightening enough without all of that?”

She turns to look out the window at the world rushing by and imagines smoke consuming the lights of the city and the punctured points of fire in the night sky. He’s right. The world is already a bad place without considering what she can’t see—what might not even be there in the first place.

They’ve got a body to bury before the sun rises. _That’s_ real. _That’s_ what they have now. Whatever else there is, at least he doesn’t think she’s crazy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From page 38 of Thomas Harris’ _Red Dragon_ : “Lounds, you write lying shit, and the National Tattler is an asswipe. Keep away from me.” 
> 
> Most of the dialogue between Abigail and Marissa is paraphrased from Bryan Fuller’s _Hannibal_ S1E3, “Potage”; also, “Abigail, show me what happened.”
> 
> Kudos if you got the reference to “The Killing” (Kacey Rohl as Sterling ftw)


	5. If the Good Lord’s Willing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mal’ak plans to blame it on proximity and demonic influence forever, but that’s never been the complete truth.
> 
>  
> 
> **The non-con tag for this chapter refers to sex that takes place while Ose is possessing someone--hence, the person herself cannot consent. If this bothers you (or if M/F sex bothers you), I might suggest not reading to the very end of the chapter. The section is comparatively short, and you can feasibly read to that point, skip the sex, and get to the end. 
> 
> Sorry for stumbling all over the place with this warning. I just want to give as much heads-up as possible. I'm not sure how people feel about this, but I got uncomfortable writing it. I figured it might make other people uncomfortable _reading_ it and didn't want to take unnecessary chances. Anyway, that's all. If I need to make adjustments to the tags or to this blurb thingamajig, please let me know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _If the good Lord’s willing and the creek stays down / I’ll be in your arms time the moon come around / For a taste of love that’s shining in your eyes / If the rooster crows at the crackin’ of the dawn / I’ll be there just as sure as you’re born_
> 
>  
> 
> A frantic crux the panther
> 
> Privileges sight; it is  
> her rumor. The house of your smoke.  
> Silver tongue
> 
> mark her silver. Her sight  
> wounds his swelling.
> 
> It houses your wings.  
> My profile
> 
> Wavy  
> Wounded  
> Smoking
> 
> Red lips, sinkhole, primroses.
> 
> Frantic the falling of witch   
> settled in light.  
> Rumor is rumor.  
> Cloaked enough for Africa
> 
> the hot flood she lasts  
> mud houses on red lips.
> 
> Large enough, the wounded panther sleeps.  
> \--Lo Gallucío, “These Diamonds Are My Very”

Mal’ak draws a hexagram on the muddy shore of Xochimilco. The farmers pulled him from this water while the excess of it fell in shining curtains of reflected sunlight off his unclothed body.

They thought him a Spaniard, but as soon as he spoke to them in their own tongue, their opinion of him shifted. The primary overseer of the chinampas allows him to stay here by the water. Chimalli considers Mal’ak a good luck charm and calls him Cuauhtémoc, a Nahuatl name that means ‘descending eagle’. When the others rallied to have him sacrificed, Chimalli stood his ground and spoke for Mal’ak. His reputation kept Mal’ak away from the altar, though the townspeople assured him it would be a great honor to die for the gods.

The moist earth beneath the anchors of his fingertips gives where he presses. Each of the six points shivers where a slow current of energy disturbs the lines drawn in the dirt. He’s unused to thinking of it in terms of raw energy the way Ose does, but there are few words to fully describe that thing that surrounds him constantly—the thing Ose touches when he wanders too near to Mal’ak to feed his foolish, inadvisable desire. Before he touched down here on the earth of clay, forest, and rushing water, this coursing substance that is more liquid than solid was more ether than liquid. It was his _breath_. It still is, in all the ways that matter.

Patesis call it ichor. Mal’ak wouldn’t correct them if he ever met one.

This symbol he’s carved into twelve sides with six spokes inward and six more facing out would expel a lesser creature than Ose has proven himself to be. Granted, he’s never dabbled in exorcisms. As far as basic methods go, he’s sure it would get the job done.

Tenochtitlan carries the wrong magic in the air for Latin prayer. Its belief that saturates the air is of a ruddier sort. Their pagan deities of destruction, jade skirts, and rain exist here. They exist every bit as much as Mal’ak does, somewhere in the gaping black of the universe beyond what they can see but within the sphere of what they begin to imagine.

Age-old practices, ancient talismans, and tricks will suffice in the place of doctrine and contrition. Mal’ak scrubs the blade of his hand over the hexagram beside his leg and quietly accepts the power that drains out of it back into him.

Because the fact of their current stalemate is unavoidable, Ose makes a grand show of presenting himself to Mal’ak at every opportunity. More often than not, he’ll choose to show himself when the time is inconvenient for one or both of them. He’s deviant in every sense of the word.

If Mal’ak were a different sort of being and not one to reject such things—or one to put on airs of rejection because there can be no alternative—he would admit to finding it endearing and even funny sometimes. He doesn’t doubt Ose also realizes this fact about Mal’ak. For all that he pretends not to be intrigued by this creature that can be a monster but has behaved himself as a man would in many respects, Ose sees through his indifference. He sees through the armor Mal’ak was sent here wearing.

For himself, Ose has no preference for the suit he wears. Lately he dons whatever nondescript form he expects Mal’ak to like. The woman is his go-to, but he uses other people, too. Boys, men, older women…tests to see what will get him a reaction. Mal’ak rolls his eyes at the very young ones, male or female. Ose has a time of it, most often when he’s unsuccessful. To him it’s a playful game. It’s fun.

Mal’ak wasn’t instructed in how to do this. He doesn’t have the slightest idea what he’s meant to do or what he can say that will seduce this beast of beasts to surrender utterly to him. There was no promise of direction, and since he plummeted down, he’s received no direct orders or guidance. He thought it would be different, yet here he is in this country of sunlight experiencing more darkness and confused turmoil than he’s ever known.

All he can afford to focus on now is his mission: Ose. It’s the only way he can continue believing that he’s on the right track. The question is how to follow through.

There are ways to cast out demons, but as Ose has already demonstrated, he can very well do that himself whenever he pleases. It’d be a different tune altogether if he could conceive of a way to dispatch Ose back to hell permanently, but to be quite honest, he has not the slightest clue of how he’s expected to make that happen. Of course he can’t let Ose know, supposing he doesn’t already, but it’s still a problem. Mal’ak deduced early on that he was selected not for his ability or technical knowledge concerning demons. He was chosen for his ability to see inside of them and inside of the mechanics of death.

It is an organic process and highly involved with electrical currents and heat and biology, but there is a much deeper, nearly untouchable aspect there beneath the veins, the moans, and the static. There’s something enchanted and enthralling about the process. Something precious shifts, tumbles, and ascends at the moment of death. Mal’ak has been there and felt it enough times to be able to recreate the teasing pressure of it in his mind, but words are another matter. He could make Ose feel that sensation; he could make that touch blossom inside of him that is a million feelings encapsulated in one burst of essence, of pain, of life.

But he doesn’t foresee Ose hating him for that. When he considers the possible outcome of sharing that experience with him that Ose has undoubtedly _felt_ but never _comprehended_ the Mal’ak has and can, Ose doesn’t fall to his feet writhing and screaming for agony and exposure.

No, he writhes and screams for different reasons: joy, maybe. Rapture, pleasure, fascination. Obsession.

Ose would love Mal’ak to open for him. It isn’t a well-kept secret. Perhaps it was never meant to be a secret at all.

He sometimes wonders to what extent he could use this bloom they share to his advantage. Every way he could think of hurting Ose that way, the intention stings Mal’ak similarly.

No matter what his purpose or his design, Mal’ak identifies with Ose. He hungers to know his mind, thirsts to see what he can truly do—he craves those visions that are greater than the already impressive disappearing act Ose is so accustomed to performing. Mal’ak is not the only one who has been observed so closely all this time. The strongest difference between them, perhaps, is that Mal’ak wears skin that is his own while Ose steals.

But for all that, however disconcerting it is to walk with someone whose flesh is another’s, Mal’ak always recognizes flashes of Ose when he acts not as the host but as himself. In the beginning when Mal’ak hunted him in earnest without a thought for himself or for the earth beneath his feet or the sunlight on his skin, Ose could fool him.

Ose did fool him. He delighted in the trick, in pulling Mal’ak in as close as he could be so that his escape was all the more dramatic and humiliating. Between them, they are both living on borrowed time. They both desire to kill each other. Ose is capable of mass destruction. So is Mal’ak.

He sighs to himself and rises from his casual post outside of Chimalli’s home. He walks down to the Xochimilco and eases his way along the shore. They’ve had rains the last few days. The soil is drunk and swollen with it the way so many of the Nahuatl people imagine it to be after a sacrifice. His feet sink with it. The earth-dyed water trickles over his toes as his heels lift and peel the balls of his feet out of the mud with every step.

The ways to murder dumu Aĝ are not unknown among Aḫḫāzu, and neither are the methods to purge Aḫḫāzu unknown to dumu Aĝ. The exact process differs for each one on either side. Temperament and size and age and resistance all factor into it. There is no cure-all or overlapping remedy for exterminating one of them, nor for exterminating one of Mal’ak’s breed. 

Many ages ago there used to be, but the world changed. With the crumbling of old civilizations and the foundations of new ones, Aḫḫāzu and dumu Aĝ adapted to fit the ever-shifting mold of the times. They evolved outside of their neat little boxes divined by the holiest of men and the most incorruptible of dumu Aĝ and patesis alike. The spells and enchantments of today are not what they were when first put to use. They are not foolproof systems, but their formulas still apply. Mal’ak believes they always will for those that are stubborn and diligent enough to find the music in the old noise of superstition.

When he’d laid eyes on Ose for the first time and seen his true face shimmering like something amphibious and half-formed, he’d seen their intertwined fates roll out before him. He’d been told this mission would not end among the shadows of pitahaya trees and bloody temples but that it could begin nowhere else.

Mal’ak endeavored to be disappointed. He endeavors. 

Ose appears to him on this morning in the city of Tenochtitlan as an adolescent boy. His dark skin glistens in the sun with sweat. He ran here to watch the sacrifice.

Mal’ak hadn’t expected to see him before the ceremony. They’d spoken briefly of this facet of Mesoamerican life on one occasion. Ose acted as if he didn’t approve of the institutionalized public murders of citizens, prisoners of war, or foreign captives. Mal’ak originally thought the complaint oddly noble, but then, of course, Ose shattered the mistily divined ideal Mal’ak built in his mind of what Ose’s words meant.

_I mean because their numbers will go down and their city will collapse for its depleted population, Akh._

He’d used that damn nickname Mal’ak didn’t ask for but that now will never leave him or belong to anyone else but Ose. Mal’ak had no words to argue against him. Ose was right to take the stars out of Mal’ak’s false dream of him.

It was almost a kindness that he’d pulled Mal’ak aside that day as they were climbing a hillside splattered in green islands of grass and wildflowers. They’d looked at each other with the sun beating down mercilessly over their heads and flattening hair to their foreheads and necks. Mal’ak was carrying a yellow tlilxochitl flower in one hand at the time, processing its beauty and glorying in the slow death of the green and white and yellow body nestled between his fingers.

Ose’s hands were empty, almost as if he were making a point of it. He’d looked at the tlilxochitl and then up at Mal’ak, and then he’d smiled, carefully extracting the flower from Mal’ak’s hand.

_Do not mistake me for a sentimental devil._

He’d expected cruelty on the little dying flower. He had expected calculated violence—some grandiose expression of aggression to remind Mal’ak with whom he was spending all his hours of daylight, darkness, dusk, and dawn—but the point hadn’t been to harm the tlilxochitl. The point was that Mal’ak did not flinch, resist, or turn away from him. 

The point is that he does not turn away from Ose now. His attention is reasonably divided given their location amid throngs of people and so much noise he can barely think straight, but Ose doesn’t let on that he’s bothered to be neglected. Mal’ak doesn’t ignore him out of obstinance or even modesty this time. Ose also has his eyes pointed elsewhere. They’re equally fixated on the small body atop Templo Mayor.

The figure is not small because the temple is a high structure or because they are standing all that far away, although it is and they are. The body they’re watching is that of an infant or perhaps someone just a bit older who squirms impatiently on the low-rising sacrificial slab.

There are words spoken, but the whole process does not happen immediately. After all, the procession would be less of a ceremony without a necessary amount of fanfare.

Mal’ak clenches his teeth so hard his jaw aches beneath the skin. Ose slides his gaze away from the proceedings to study Mal’ak before his critical line of sight glides beyond or behind him. Ose’s gone in an instant, bounding away and away toward the pending sacrifice that neither of them, for all their power, can really stop. Mal’ak watches, spellbound, as members of the crowd shiver in waves with Ose’s otherworldly passage straight through them. He leaves a wake behind him just like a heavy object dragged through water might. An unseen spectator cries out somewhere to his right. Mal’ak can’t begin to guess why. The tension in the air is palpable and the energy high.

Tenochtitlan, beautiful, breathtaking city that she is, loves bloodshed. Her people have come to desire its rusted taste and the sheen of spilled rubies that it yields.

Ose’s possession of the child happens fluidly. The young body stretched out over the altar slows, goes still, and relaxes. The executioner bends to check for life and straightens out, clearly satisfied. He probably believes the boy’s fainted, but Mal’ak can sense without feeling why that the eyes remain wide open. Mal’ak, for his part, doesn’t blink.

The inevitable weight of the killing blow rakes slowly and deliberately down the child’s middle. Once the blade is handed off, the priest standing over the child plunges his hand into the lax body where the ribs meet in the center. Mal’ak presses his lips together. The child’s face flickers erratically with hints of that watery blackness that truly _is_ Ose’s being.

The body on the stone convulses. That same voice that cried out from before screams again. Mal’ak searches for it this time but is too distracted. The child thrashes, but it’s no use. The boy doesn’t suffer. Ose does.

Tenochtitlan’s onlookers, for the most part, are accustomed to this brand of slaughter. This child, though he torments someone in this audience today, doesn’t faze them. It is as they told Mal’ak when he came to them: an honor and a privilege to die for the gods. 

Mal’ak tells himself he should be the least of the affected here today. Ose’s pain is vivid while the innocent victim feels nothing. The pain set upon him is excruciating, yet he doesn’t flee from it. For some untold reason, he stays there and bears it in the place of another. It’s torture and some order of punishment that Mal’ak should have inflicted upon him by now.

He watches the priest’s hand emerge with a heart no bigger than a pitahaya fruit still yellow from too little time on the vine. Mal’ak tastes salt in his mouth where his cheek bleeds onto his tongue.

The body seizes once, and that prolapsed, automatic gesture takes a lifetime to transpire. In time with a low wail, a black, gnarled entity unfurls from the wasted, blood-soaked cadaver as smoke does from a brush fire. It’s a visceral thing with an unreal amount of physical pain attached to it. Something far more excruciating and debilitating than the bare fact of the wounds in and of themselves sits buried beneath the noise.

Incontrovertibly nestled into the trauma of that one death is the reliable expectation of its sting. It is not torturous heat or hellfire. It is the cold darkness of void without a skin to wear. It is Ose’s life source. Without his armor fashioned from clay, he is the smoke that drifts out of the emptied coal. He is the shadow bereft of light.

He can be broken by light. Mal’ak can break him.

His cheek trickles blood behind his teeth in a silent question. Even as that tiny flood staunches and heals itself, his fickle body, also fashioned from clay, asks how much of himself is smoke and how much is ember.

Ose returns to his side wearing a different person. Mal’ak looks and the previous boy has long since wandered away from the scene. Ose’s face looks different, not shadowy with the burns of hell but gaunt with the exertion of what has just happened to him. Mal’ak can do nothing but stare. His inclination finds its drive in need, curiosity, and something very desperately, frighteningly near to madness.

This would be as good a time as any to reach into Ose and pull him out from the warmth of his current human body and into the nakedness of this plane. It would kill Ose, maybe, just as it killed the child. To rip him out of his current host while he’s vulnerable and expose him before he’s had a chance to get his bearings might render him insensate, weak, practically a non-threat.

Mal’ak stares. His mind touches closer to confusion than to rationality. He blames Ose, but he knows well enough that it would be a stronger touch than mere befuddlement if Ose meant to affect him.

He blames him anyway. Perhaps he always will. Ose enjoys the attention.

An hour later they are still standing near Templo Mayor where the child’s body has been placed at the bottom steps leading to the Oratory of Huitzilopochtli. The cracked open middle shines in the waning daylight. Mal’ak would leave this vision to memory if he could, but he can’t yet.

“Why did you do that?”

Ose has recovered by this point, but he still looks shaken. Mal’ak has never witnessed anything of this sort by Aḫḫāzu, nor has he been primed to think they could behave in such a way. He hadn’t been told one of them could desire one of him before either. Mal’ak ought to have learned by now that Ose doesn’t play by the rules.

And if he doesn’t, then Mal’ak can’t either. Not anymore. Not if things like this are possible. It means that Ose is dangerous and unpredictable—more so than anyone believed he could be.

It means something more than that. What it is depends on Ose’s answer to the question.

“Tell me why,” he demands when Ose absentmindedly watches the sky tinged with a sanguine sunset.

He doesn’t spare Mal’ak a moment’s glance. They begin to walk. When he tries, Mal’ak can’t remember who started walking first. For a long time they’re silent and calm. By degrees Ose simmers back to his regular energy level.

Immediately after the sacrifice Mal’ak had barely been able to detect his presence nudging at the edges of his perception. In uneven bursts, finally, Ose comes back to himself. His former unconsciously assertive flair settles that nervous element in Mal’ak which can’t forget the taste of blood in his mouth.

Ose sits by the water’s edge where they’ve ended up at Lake Chalco. Mal’ak sits beside him, paying no mind to their proximity when Ose doesn’t move away from him. The sun has long set and lulled the sky into darkness.

Mal’ak closes his eyes at his mistake of discovering this point of openness that Ose grants him. Because there is a weakness, he can exploit it. Ose allows him near to his physical body. Mal’ak must abuse his trust—this beautiful thing he has earned by simply allowing himself to receive it.

The sin is not that it’s beautiful, he realizes with a sinking heart. The sin is that he has no right to take it, much less to want it. He can’t let himself dwell on why the second part is evil. It will force him to look too closely at himself. As it is, he still tastes rust and salt on his tongue.

Ose sighs, eyes closed and fingers relaxed on the ground at his sides. “His name is Huitzilli.”

Mal’ak blinks, not entirely understanding. He repeats the name, “Huitzilli.” When the name spoken again like an incantation elicits no response, Mal’ak turns it over in his mind. He asks, “The boy they sacrificed?”

“His father,” Ose corrects him. “The boy’s father.”

“I don’t…what does that matter to you?”

Ose drops his head and lazily opens his eyes so he can stare at Mal’ak for several long, heavy seconds. He cracks a small smile and murmurs, “I suppose it doesn’t.”

“Ose…”

But Ose is gone before he can form a proper sentence. The man sitting in his place, a totally transformed person absent of Ose’s control, contorts his face into a confused frown. Mal’ak stands and leaves their quiet place by the lake without giving him an explanation. He can fabricate a story for himself if he needs one. Humans are resilient in the most surprising ways.

The walk to Culhuacan is a shorter one than the walk from Tenochtitlan to Chalco, but the passage of time and physical space doesn’t quite function for them as it does for humans. They process liminality differently, being of Other realms and of matter that is neither here nor there but in between.

Chimalli is asleep when Mal’ak comes to their informally shared hut atop the hilly region of the chinampas. Mal’ak sits near the exit of the modest accommodations and plans for the next day, spooling through information he’s kept close to his chest so far, not wanting to waste it at inopportune moments. His mind returns to the Seal of Solomon, though it would serve as little more than a hindrance to someone of Ose’s caliber. At the talisman’s core, it is a protective symbol and one used to case out demons rather than kill them.

He could perhaps attempt to use it to control Ose, but he doesn’t expect that would go over too well. Mal’ak has come to earn his own well of darkly exquisite power, over both the physical and the ethereal, but Ose is a master of the mind where Mal’ak would only be guessing. 

Great amounts of pain and biological death of his host don’t extinguish Ose either. Mal’ak could maybe summon an entity with more authority and strength than Ose, but…

Chimalli stirs on his cot. He sucks in a fast breath and twists under his one thin blanket. His frame is thin but not undernourished. The strength in his limbs is a wiry one, roughened by many years of fieldwork and a short stint among the warrior ranks. It haunts his sleeping mind now, tossing his body one way and then the other, twisting his mouth in a silent scream.

Mal’ak watches that voiceless terror catch in his throat, friction sliding into vibration that chills Mal’ak all down his spine. He imagines a knife splitting him down the middle and halving his body so that everything falls out of him, not just his heart but every slippery, steaming organ abbreviated by an endless fountain of blood.

He springs to his feet and crosses the small room to crouch beside Chimalli and shake his shoulders. Before he’s roused to full awareness, Chimalli’s arm shoots to his left and produces a knife. His hand is fast, a puppet of instinct.

His eyes snap open as the blade parts skin to drive deep into a stew of intestines and viscera. It rests at the hilt. Sure fingers quickly release the blunted handle and tremble, lips producing a very different kind of sound than the screams from earlier.

“Cuauhtémoc,” Chimalli whispers, sounding just as shocked as Mal’ak, who hasn’t dared to breathe yet.

“Shh,” he allows himself to say with the little air he has left in his lungs. His hands on Chimalli’s shoulders spasm and he moves one of them to rest on his friend’s forehead. “You’re having a bad dream. Go to sleep.”

“Cuauhtémoc,” he tries again, but he’s already drifting off beneath the hand throwing a shadow over his mind like a cloud ambulating across the sun.

Mal’ak staggers onto the floor and tears the knife sunken into his stomach out of him, gritting his teeth as it leaves his body. Blood gushes forth and then slows to a trickle, reminiscent of the morning they’d pulled him from the lake. The fountain he trailed was pure then—water from the lake as natural and faultless as the earth itself.

The red stain glaring up at him now tells him he has changed. Even as the blood stops itself, the stain does not let up. Mal’ak tosses the blade back to its place beside Chimalli’s sleeping form and goes to the water to clean the savagery from his form.

Rather than return to the hut, he makes for the trees and walks for two hours, searching for a substitute to explain the blood away. He registers the weight of another’s gaze on him and stops walking. Mal’ak sighs and turns, cleaned for the most part but clearly ruffled, to say the least.

“That husk of a warrior murdered you,” Ose muses, voice gone dark at the edges where Mal’ak feels they should be playful or ironic.

“I’m not murdered. I live.”

“How pitiful it would have been for your end to come at the beck and call of a bad dream.”

Some of the expected sarcasm does enter Ose’s tone now, but it still rings false somehow. Mal’ak starts walking, trusting Ose to do whatever he pleases whether he stays or presses on. Ose walks and leaves a few paces between them.

“What are you doing out here?”

“Hunting,” Mal’ak replies indifferently.

Sounding annoyed, Ose asks, “Aḫḫāzu?” 

“I was thinking something smaller.” Mal’ak throws a glance over his shoulder at Ose’s blank face—a man’s face tonight. “It will be easier to convince him he did not actually kill me if he wakes to find evidence that he killed something else.”

“A child?” Ose drawls flippantly, breezing past Mal’ak to walk ahead of him. He turns and walks backwards so they can face each other, which is disconcerting but not entirely unpleasant, though Mal’ak would only confess to the first feeling and not the second. “What would it matter if another one died tonight?”

Mal’ak opens his mouth to retort but stops himself, the words drying up on his tongue. He stops walking, and a moment later, Ose also stops.

There’s a rumbling sound that rolls out from beneath the black nets flung down by the trees on both sides of their footpath. Ose’s gaze remains fixed on Mal’ak while the noise builds on itself like the swell of the tide overwhelming a shell-speckled shore.

Ose tilts his head to the side, eyes narrowing into slits while he studies Mal’ak with a curious expression. He takes a half step to the left and raises the arm nearest to the thicket of trees and tall grass, and without fully understanding, Mal’ak shifts his stance so his feet slide further apart. He’s better situated to catch the swinging momentum of the thick-pelted animal that lunges out at him from the shadows.

He’s knocked off his feet and barred to the ground by a snarling mass of coarse bristles for fur. Mal’ak throws his arms up to force the animal’s teeth away from his face, but its eyes spark and then blaze red. Long strings of saliva break as it snaps its jaws at him. The red in those feline eyes is unrecognizably violent.

At last, this is the monster Mal’ak was sent for.

His hand slips, ligaments in his shoulder shred beneath claws, and the leopard growls from the back of its throat. There’s a moment while it rears back to roar that Mal’ak forgets to see it as a thing possessed but as the pure embodiment of power in nature that it is—that _she_ is. She is powerful. She is power itself.

The red sheen of her eyes slips back into a filmy, reflective yellow at one angle and pale, glassy green at another. Mal’ak scrambles for a handhold at the leopard’s neck and the roar in her throat buzzes firmly beneath his palm, inside of his fingers, down his wrist. He twists his body around and wrestles her beneath him, seeing for half a second as he surfaces that Ose’s host is lying on the ground. Mal’ak can’t tell if he’s dead or alive.

He starts to strangle the beast beneath him the way Heracles had done with the lion of Nemea, but to kill her would be cruel. She sees him in that instant, mammalian pupils large and endless like the eternity she will pass into one night but not now and not by his hand.

If Ose is not to die here, then neither will she be subjected to that fate in his place. Mal’ak arrives at the decision just as she thrashes and throws him off.

He can see in the way she springs to her feet and rolls her shoulders with a thirst for death in her gilt eyes that Ose resides there within her still. Bleeding and dragging air into his lungs, Mal’ak staggers into an upright position and bides his time while his body mends itself on a boost of adrenaline.

“Is this what we come to then?”

The leopard bares her teeth and grunts twice, unleashing a growled litany that rings in Mal’ak’s ears like curses. Terror burns in his spine. Ose bows with the leopard’s head, with her huge paws, with her long curved back prepared to vault him through the air right for Mal’ak’s throat. 

_He’s going to make me kill her,_ Mal’ak thinks, daring to take a step back.

Ose’s growl erupts into a barked roar and then another. Even understanding that he isn’t beaten here, the fear is still there. It glows beneath the surface of him. It forces his blood to pound in his ears and stitches his sustained wounds.

“Ose, don’t.”

He will anyway. He always will.

His shoulders roll back once, and the lithe but heavy body lifts off the ground more like a divine being than an animal of this earth. Mal’ak feels his lungs expand around air and the next thing he knows there is pain, shredding and gutting him as if from the inside out. Something in his back shifts and there’s a horrible sound of bones snapping and something much louder. The scream that peels out into the night comes from a place he can’t readily define.

Mal’ak opens his eyes and the planes of his form sting and thrum. The ground shrinks several feet beneath him to the steady beating of a pulse apart from his body. It sounds out a drumbeat of fanned air rushing, rushing…the simple fanning of inhumanly gargantuan wings. For a span of a few seconds his limbs lock up and he nearly falls out of the sky before an innate reflex propels him several feet higher, appendages far heavier than arms flapping desperately to keep him afloat.

A thousand confused voices explode in his ears like a stopped up outlet has just loosened with the creaking of these ancient joints. Everything comes through too cluttered, too fast, and too sudden for him to make sense of it. He closes his eyes to try and listen, but as quickly as the uproar came, it falls away.

Down below, the leopard stares up at him for a moment before sprinting in the opposite direction over dozens of felled trees. The scope of ruin encompasses his wingspan.

Behind him a voice void of sound muses, _“You worried you wouldn’t be fearsome to behold.”_

Mal’ak turns, clumsy for how his body has changed. An integral component of flight is familiar enough to him that learning is easier than swimming had been. Ose’s speech is all suggestion, dust, and echo without real substance to be heard, touched, or seen. He presents himself as little more than a darker outline staining the black night. The edges of him spark the dull red of a faltering flame. Mal’ak suspects it isn’t a natural feature but a conscious gesture.

“I told you not to,” Mal’ak seethes through his teeth. A fire burns where his skin has ripped itself open across his chest to accommodate for the changed mountains of muscle. The Nahuatl spills out of his mouth—he’ll have to thank Chimalli later for exposing him to swear words: “Hijo de la chingada!”

Ose laughs, a delighted sound not unlike the leopard’s vicious growl.

Agitated with the pain accumulating in his back Mal’ak starts to descend. His toes graze the tops of a tree some ways beyond those he struck down. He spares a thought for the wildlife and winces. A presence slides up into the spaces at his back and eases between plumage and raw cartilage.

_“Flight would suit you better, dumu Aĝ.”_

Mal’ak struggles, tiring quickly with the fruitlessness of it. “Let go of me.”

_“You aren’t listening. The muscle is unused. You would only be doing yourself a disservice to let it wither.”_

Held, Mal’ak relaxes for just a moment. His back cramps as if he’s been curled in a ball all his life. Surely a year or so without flight hasn’t reduced him to this nearly crippled state. He beats his wings experimentally, knowing better than to think he can’t fly since he had in a moment of fear. Ose doesn’t relent. Mal’ak is only aware of him in the sense that he exists like the cold or the warmth riding on the wind—just an essence of the air clinging to his skin.

_“I think you want to fly.”_

“I think _you_ want me to fly.”

_“It wounded you terribly to think that the point of your body was to please me. This is nothing to do with me.”_

“Isn’t it?” Mal’ak mutters ironically, twisting around to look at Ose but finding it unnecessary when Ose winds around his front instead. “I’m like this because you made to kill me, finally.”

Ose appears to smile, his form shimmering and pulsing like a current churning through a river.

_“Do you know that I meant to harm you in the way you suspect?”_

“Do you expect me to believe you didn’t?”

Cheekily, and it’s odd that Mal’ak can tell but he can, Ose says, _“I wondered what you could take.”_

“Are you satisfied?”

A coyote somewhere yips and bays, answered a few seconds later by the howls of others in its pack. Ose presses closer, constricting and easing enough for Mal’ak to recognize it as an embrace. He whispers, _“Intensely.”_

Mal’ak swallows and squirms, refusing to acknowledge the slow dawning of realization that this is his chance to _do something_.

He stares. Ose grins, wolfish.

Panicked and not liking why, Mal’ak breaks away from him and does the only sensible thing he can bear. He beats his wings toward the earth and flies up and up, the wind freezing his face as he soars over green treetops, scales long hillsides, surpasses the temples of Tenochtitlan, and traverses the dark water housing the moon and her stars. Beyond that glimpse of the endless night that is heaven and timelessness and distance and dying light, he can make out the speck of his reflection.

He’s not unrecognizable, but the difference is undeniable. Mal’ak touches down near Teotihuacan at Lake Xaltocan to gaze down at his face in the water. It’s the unchanged but for the spray of blood coloring the side of his neck and the ridge of his jaw. Whether that came from the leopard or from the transformation, he can’t say. His shoulders have sunken into the greater appendages engulfing the space of his back, which is to say that they’ve completely swallowed his shoulders. It’s disconcerting, but as he moves them around and watches how the joints move, he can see that human shoulders would only obstruct mobility.

The tips of those wings brush the ground when he holds them at his back and sag in heaps when he slouches. If he were still possessed of his hands he might resemble an ape dragging its knuckles. He straightens out and rolls one wing and then the other forward. Someone walks up behind him. Ose’s found himself another skin.

“Magnificent,” he says.

Mal’ak turns and looks at him from over the sloped hill of one wing. Ose’s face is easier to read this way cloaked in human expression, robed in fallibility. Mal’ak pivots and takes a step back so that hit foot dips beneath the shallows of the lake. He murmurs, “I can only imagine what you would do with a body crafted to suit your purposes.”

“The populace of the world exists to suit my purposes.” He smiles and steps forward to match Mal’ak’s slow retreat. “Civilization _and_ the wilds above their rules.”

“But you’ll never be the body you wear,” Mal’ak argues, arching his back as he steps above the mud banks to walk, like a true blasphemer, on the surface of the water. Ose’s gaze drops to his feet and then jumps back up eagerly to Mal’ak’s face. His smile widens.

“Are any of us our bodies, Akh?”

“You could answer that better than I can, Ose.”

Ose hesitates at the bank where the lake meets the land. He steps out of his host’s sandals and glides along the edge of the water without pretending to walk until he arrives at Mal’ak’s side where he’s stopped moving. Ose licks his lips. Mal’ak turns to face the direction in which they move, toward the marshes that divide Lake Zumpango from Xaltocan. 

“And do you feel exercised?” Ose asks, turning a slow, infinitely entertained smirk on Mal’ak.

Mal’ak narrows his eyes but can’t deny that the invigorating buzz of wear in his back is like nothing else. The ends of his wingtips, a few inches on each side, delve beneath the water and drag. There are schools of fish below. A select few dare to approach the surface and test his feathers with curious mouths. He doesn’t tug on them but does direct his gaze at the tiny bodies he can see through the navy gem of the lake. Insects chirp and sing from their places by the shore and from their nests within the marshes as if they’re equally amused at the intricate simplicity of nature.

“Why did you spare the child his suffering?” Mal’ak asks after long minutes of breathing the cold air and the close scent of humidity embedded in the bark of the trees and their heavy green leaves.

“Why did you aspire to fool Chimalli into thinking he had not gutted you in his sleep?”

Mal’ak slows to a halt, brushing his fingers along the hanging leaves of a low branch. Water sloshes between his toes as he swings his foot idly back and forth.

“I wished for him not to be afraid of something he couldn’t help.”

Ose doesn’t look at him. He merely keeps his eyes on the stars. In such a mundane moment, unsmiling and unmoving and unspeaking, the man he’s commandeered appears to be only a man.

As if detecting that a piece of his façade has been deciphered, Ose closes his eyes and turns away to explore the creeks that run through patches of grass. Mal’ak remains by the tree line and watches him. The sulfurous fumes of the marsh waft up around him in time with the needle drone of mosquitoes. 

“What will you bring back for him in your stead?” Ose asks of Chimalli, skirting Mal’ak’s question still.

“I thought a coyote, but the further I walked in search of one, the more the thought of needless sacrifice sickened me.”

“Killing the leopard wouldn’t have been needless.”

Mal’ak moves to follow Ose, pace slow and deliberate. “You told me there _was_ no need.”

Ose looks at him without stopping or turning.

“I told you I hadn’t meant for your destruction. I didn’t say I had no thought of harming you. To speak plainly, I would have ripped you to shreds as the Titans tore Bacchus limb from limb.”

They look at each other in the moonlight. Ose smirks and Mal’ak smirks back before he can think better of it.

“Do you doubt my ability?” Ose says, pursing his host’s lips with no thought for how the man looks but for how Mal’ak will see _him_ through the mask.

“No,” he answers honestly. “But I find the nod back to the Greeks charming in this place.”

“Then Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca as serpents when they split Tlaltecuhtli in two,” he fires back.

“So I am Leviathan?” Mal’ak muses too warmly with a soft smile that he feels in the back of his throat and in the spokes of his frailer but impossibly stronger bones. “The beast sleeping in the folds of the fourth Great Flood.”

Ose doesn’t miss the soft tone in his voice if his slightly widened eyes are any indication. He says, “Part of you becomes the sky and the other, the earth.”

“I suppose I consumed death in much the same way as Tlaltecuhtli,” Mal’ak concedes.

“Far more than. Don’t be modest.”

Mal’ak squints at him, catching himself before his head tilts to one side in a mirror image of Ose’s analytical stance. It’s not the first time Ose has spoken to Mal’ak of the death he’s overseen in his days prior to Tenochtitlan. He introduces the topic every time as if it were food or a more precious type of nourishment.

He asks Ose, “We’ve met before, have we?”

“In Ravenna,” he answers readily, stone faced.

“Dante,” Mal’ak says. Ose nods once. “I was sorry to take him.”

“I was sorry to see him go.”

“You were his muse?”

“The devil on his shoulder,” Ose says around a smirk that falters. “Until the angel came to collect.”

“And how many have you claimed, Ose?” Mal’ak asks, not defensively. His wings twitch under a mosquito bite and he shakes them out, spraying Ose with flecks of water that shoot through the dark like jewels.

“Many,” he says, tipping his head. “I’ve never thought to count them.”

“Neither have I.”

“And why should you?” Ose raises his arms to indicate the trees, the dense web of humidity, and the insects. He looks poised to summon another beast from the shadows. “Why should the leopard or the eagle remember their prey?”

Mal’ak drops his gaze and notices the bulbous mass of muscle protruding from his abdomen like a second set of pectorals. He rolls his wings and watches them shift and roil, supporting weight and motion an unchanged body couldn’t manage. He rolls them a few more times, quite enamored of the unique friction of this skin on this plane.

Ose lifts his hand to graze the tips of his fingers along that expanse of muscle, following the natural line of Mal’ak’s body to his left wing, fingers digging in between plumes and stroking down. A violent shiver ripples down Mal’ak’s back and a noise forces its way out of his mouth. His head drops back and he snaps his mouth shut, blinking rapidly in the dark and fluttering his other wing, deeply flustered.

Intrigued, Ose says, “No one has touched you here before.”

Mal’ak smacks his hand away, mourning the lost touch when it doesn’t return. The fact is he can’t remember if anyone has.

“I can’t walk around town looking like this,” he says with an abrupt thought of the approaching dawn.

“So change back,” Ose tells him, blasé as if he’s commenting on the bugs or the calm weather.

Mal’ak blinks at him. Ose blinks back.

“You don’t know how to change back.”

“I…I’ve never had to.” He sighs and snaps, “It’s not like I’ve done any of this before.”

Ose grants him with another unconscious head tilt and makes wordlessly for the banks of Teotihuacan. They’re on solid ground again before Mal’ak realizes he followed Ose there.

Belatedly he asks, “Do you know how?”

“I can think of two ways. The first way would not be to your liking.”

Frowning, Mal’ak asks why not.

“An intrinsic aspect of sanity is expectation. We expect reality to be a certain way that precludes the existence of certain other variations of reality. Children, for instance, or those who suffer from ailments of the mind, have the power to process reality in its more creative channels but are often devastated to find the world only works in a number of ways rather than an infinite number of ways. That is why you sought an animal to slay for Chimalli. That is why I possessed Huitzilli’s son at the moment of his death. Reality would not bend for them, but we would.”

“So, what, you’ll bend reality and get my arms back? I don’t follow you.”

Ose sighs. “My craft is breaking the line between reality and that which is perceived by the senses.”

Mal’ak blinks again. “You want to get inside my head.”

“I can think of nothing more wonderful,” Ose croons. “But I don’t see you giving me permission to do that.”

“You would ask?” Mal’ak asks, swallowing around his tongue and breathlessness.

“Never mind. We will try the other way.”

“Wait,” Mal’ak commands him, pushing one wing out to block Ose from pacing away from him. Ose looks at him, and Mal’ak wonders distantly if Ose can breathe or if he’s similarly affected. “Why do you suspect it would work?”

“Fear triggered your transformation. Fear is of your mind. The trigger to set you as you were will not be too far from it.”

“You can touch that fear, through…” He stops. “You don’t mean ḫasīs?” 

Ose doesn’t say yes, but yes is the answer. Mal’ak swallows, uneasy. “Couldn’t that kill you?”

“Melding myself to the ichor God molded you with?” Ose asks, aiming for sarcasm and instead hitting on something much stranger that coils heat in Mal’ak’s belly. “I imagine if it didn’t, it would be in your power to make it such.”

“Why would you suggest it?”

Ose grits his teeth. “You know aḫḫāzu, Akh. You know we love to dance in the fire.”

Mal’ak tucks his wings in by his sides and holds his breath. He doesn’t trust either one of them with something so intimate and dangerous as a result of its intimacy. He strains his ears, listening for those voices he heard in the air but that haven’t returned to him since.

He waits for the tension in his throat to loosen, but it doesn’t. In a tight voice, he asks, “What’s the second way?”

Ose almost looks disappointed, but he doesn’t say so. Mal’ak doesn’t let on that he understands.

“Sit with me,” he says in a small voice.

Mal’ak manages with some difficulty, nearly pitching forward onto his face when his wings throw him off balance. Ose settles him and then releases him. The pressure of his hands lingers in the feathered ridges that overlay his biceps.

“Be still,” Ose murmurs, twisting out of the man he leaves to topple over onto his back. _“I won’t hurt you.”_

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, Mal’ak doesn’t doubt his word. He sucks in a breath at the onslaught of cold that hadn’t accompanied Ose’s presence before. His arms lift up almost beyond his control, the shadow of his being slipping through the gaps and pushing where friction and matter leaves no empty spaces. Mal’ak chokes on an intake of air at the loud pop of something in his back.

_“It will feel much the same way as before,”_ Ose says with something interestingly near to sympathy.

Mal’ak forces the breath out of his lungs and breathes through another obscene crack of bone.

_“They’ve gone hollow like a bird’s,”_ Ose observes.

“Oh, have they,” Mal’ak gasps, crying out and falling forward when sitting antagonizes the stress in his spine to the point of agony. Bereft of his hands to support him, the awkwardly tented wings wobble and drop him onto his face. Panting into wet grass and clumped mud, he says, “I wondered.”

_“Relax, Akh.”_

“Like you relaxed on the altar when the blade cut you?” Mal’ak growls and twists in the dirt at the tearing sensation in his arms and in the viscous tendons and veins rupturing beneath the surface. A pained groan spills out of him like blood and buries itself into the earth to be reborn someday as a yellow faced tlilxochitl. Dirt adheres to his cheek where strings of spit have smeared into the ground. He snarls, “You hypocrite.”

_“Relax, Akh,”_ he repeats, the pain lifting and cooling with relief. _“Relax, or you will stay like this.”_

His back hums with the lifted weight, lungs constricting around his air supply.

“Can’t,” he grunts, coughing dirt and blood and saliva. “I can’t, I can’t.”

“Mal’ak,” Ose calls him, inserting human hands beneath his arms and lifting him off the ground. “Mal’ak, your body heals even now. Don’t you feel it mending itself?”

“You don’t know anything,” Mal’ak protests feebly, enraged beyond explanation for having received the very thing he asked Ose to give him. Even as whatever Ose did to him steadily repairs without intervention, he shakes, unable to make himself stop. “You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know anything.”

“I don’t know anything,” Ose says into the sheen of sweat on Mal’ak’s forehead. He brushes his lips over his temple, urgent and foreign and _welcome_. “I don’t know anything about you.”

Mal’ak’s lungs slow down a moment later, alerting him to the absence of rasping, desperate gasps in the quiet of Teotihuacan. He goes slack, suspended with his head on Ose’s shoulder and his fingers combing through the thickets of feathers at his back.

“I’m sorry that didn’t work,” Ose whispers.

Mal’ak starts to reply, venom waiting on his tongue that never comes. He trusted that Ose’s method would work, that he wouldn’t intend to hurt him the way he so utterly has, that Ose means it somehow when he says that he’s sorry.

Why did he trust? Whence did the faith come?

_Faith._

He chokes on his own poison and fights tooth and nail to repress the sob building inside of him. He is lost.

Ose’s fingers pause at his back for a second, two. He opens his mouth, closes it, and resumes running his fingers through the feathers branching out from Mal’ak’s forearms.

“Mal’ak.”

Though he still struggles to breathe, he asks, “What?”

“Would you like to try again?”

Mal’ak blinks around heat and moisture welling up in his eyes, anticipating the pain that will come. He makes up his mind and sits up on his knees. He says, “With a difference this time.”

Ose watches him with his hands buried still in his feathers. Mal’ak waits for him to ask, but he doesn’t.

“Keep your hands there,” he instructs, gritting his teeth around phantom soreness. He reaches back to hold Ose’s elbows to establish a connection. They’ve never had this much physical contact between them, but it’s already familiar and bordering on comfortable. “I don’t know that I can share this with you,” he sighs, focusing but very much unsure of how to actualize what he has in mind.

“Try,” Ose insists.

Mal’ak snaps at him. “No, really?”

Ose presses his lips together, squeezing his fingers and pinching one of Mal’ak’s feathers.

“Ow!”

A startled laugh falls from Ose’s lips, but he ducks his head, looking almost shy. “Sorry.”

Mal’ak shakes his head and breathes, concentrating on the short burst of agony that is the pain of death he has experienced through others so many times before. He can tell by the remembered taste of it in his mouth that it is not what Ose has experienced of death. For Mal’ak it is mercy. There is no wildly grasping fear that searches for a handhold. It is letting go and a victory of its own.

The only possible end to life, after all, is death. Ose finds terror in it because that end is not an end at all to him but an in-between point floating vaguely in the mist. When he skips from body to body, he doesn’t give himself time to lose momentum. The crux of it is that death _is_ a loss of momentum.

With the sacrifice today, he came to a complete halt. He hit a brick wall, and instead of crossing a long distance with multiple possessions, he was expulsed slowly and meticulously.

Mal’ak had seen all of Ose’s form for the first time that morning atop Templo Mayor. Before then, he’d only caught glimpses of his face or flashes of maroon through his eyes. Never had he seen all of him stretching, bending, and shivering so hard Mal’ak would swear the tremor shook simultaneously within his very own bones. That was before tonight with the leopard and the emergence of Mal’ak’s wings that truly make him worthy of the borrowed name Cuauhtémoc.

He finds the note he’s looking for and drifts with it, sailing after the cloud like a shaman chasing the prophetic shadow of peyotl. Ose’s mouth drops open, and he looks at Mal’ak in very much the same state of mind with his pupils wide and black—yet another extension of whatever crevice in heaven he fell from however many thousands of years ago.

Ose twitches his fingers at Mal’ak’s back and then purposely digs back in, the first jolt stinging and intensifying but soothed in increments by the gentle balm of rest that follows death and sometimes precedes it by a second or two.

Without having to be asked this time, Mal’ak does relax. He all but goes slack against the support of Ose’s borrowed body and winces around the burn of bones shifting and popping, expanding beneath his skin and breaking him open a second time. Ose shifts to prop him up and mutters something under his breath, maybe a command that Mal’ak’s body isn’t programmed to react to, except…

He crumples in on himself at the wet pop and crack of his shoulders blooming from a mess of blood and mucous and flayed flesh. He gasps and shudders hard at the heat traveling down the length of his arms and resting where his fingers spring forth from a mess of sticky feathers. Ose holds him as his body jerks into a painful series of convulsions, turning him gently onto his back and keeping his arms pinned to the ground in the shape of a cross.

“Just this now,” Ose whispers, meaning to soothe him.

Mal’ak grits his teeth and focuses again on the dream of death he keeps in the back of his mind. It’s the right choice. The next wave of convulsions compresses the great expanse of his wings that nearly take up the entire space by the water laid flat on either side of him. They squeeze and refashion themselves into the familiar semblance of human arms with the proper joints and ligaments. The second row of muscle below his sternum collapses, and he does scream at last.

Ose relaxes his hold over his arms, hands slipping where Mal’ak’s skin is cold and tacky with drying fluids. He sighs, hints of a giddy laugh riding the sound. Mal’ak sinks into the ground and flexes his fingers. 

After a long, patient moment, he laughs, too.

“What did you do?” Ose asks, bewildered and amazed from his place crouched just over Mal’ak’s trembling left shoulder.

“What I was made to do,” he sighs, eyes closing tiredly.

“Would you believe that I’ve never seen anything like you?”

“No.”

Ose doesn’t reply. He sits in silence, one hand resting over Mal’ak’s bare shoulder. His shirt is in strips down his front.

“You should wash. It will be morning soon.”

“Oh,” Mal’ak mumbles, sitting up slowly. “Chimalli.”

“I will handle his memory.”

“What?”

“Into the water, Akh.” He leads him, legs shaky for all that he’s recovered. “You’ve shed enough blood for one night.”

It’s a crude perversion of a baptism—the spew of hell washing the congealed wounds of a fallen one. He isn’t yet, of course. That fall will come later. He wasn’t convinced before, but he is now.

The fish nip questioningly at his ankles and toes as if they recognize him from earlier. They are far enough away from the marshes that the air is not rank with the smell of swamp and waterlogged grass. Soon the red tinge of morning will bruise the sky. They’ll need to hurry to get back to Chimalli before the sun rises.

Ose’s hands are gentle where they curve along the hills and valleys of his tender shoulders. Mal’ak allows himself to accept the hard won mercy but drags himself out of the water the minute he’s presentable.

They walk back to the chinampas bordering Xochimilco in silence. It is an unpleasant one.

Perhaps this is part of the plan? He hadn’t been sent here to destroy Ose, not really. His purpose was to find him and to set into motion a much more devastating chain of events that would ultimately lead to his death _someday_ but not in Tenochtitlan.

Wasn’t it? Couldn’t he justify not taking his chance to kill Ose when it was laid down at his feet so humbly?

Following that logic, couldn’t he also attribute the absence of commands from heaven to that prophecy? His hunger for the image of Ose’s form comprised of smoky tendrils and almost feline, arching curves could be written off. Ose’s obvious hunger for him—whether his throat is trapped beneath a leopard’s paw or whether he finds his wings or sheds them—could be of the same vein.

They can’t kill each other here. There are to live until their paths cross again somewhere else, and _that_ will be the time.

But won’t that be so much worse?

Mal’ak feels _now_. He can’t imagine where his heart will be in a year, in a hundred, in a thousand.

There’s a chance he will have lost all notion of affection for Ose, but there’s a chance it will be multiplied tenfold if not more. By then, he can’t say for certainty what Ose’s intention for him will be. They could hate each other, they could want each other; after that much time he thinks either passion would destroy them both.

“Why have you stopped?”

Mal’ak looks at Ose and then down at his feet. His heart feels fit to burst in his chest.

“What?” he rasps brokenly.

Ose comes around to stand in front of him and asks, concerned, “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing,” he says, but his heart pounds in his ears and chokes his throat. “Nothing, Ose.”

He doesn’t believe him, naturally, but he doesn’t press the issue. They continue walking until they arrive at Xochimilco in the same uncomfortable silence from before. Ose shows himself into the hut still stained with dark blood. He crouches by Chimalli’s side, moving the knife out of his reach as he tosses a pointed look at Mal’ak from over his shoulder.

Mal’ak watches him place a hand over Chimalli’s closed eyes. Nothing extraordinary happens, but he stays there for a long time not moving while Chimalli breathes in and out slowly. He turns and stares a while at the red stain he left on the floor, on the bed, and on Chimalli himself. The wound was apparently much worse than he thought initially. Behind him Ose stands to his feet.

“He won’t have those dreams anymore.”

“How did you take them?” Mal’ak asks quietly.

“The peace you’ve tasted of death,” Ose answers, eyes taking in the bloodstains. “I took his fear the same way. It won’t touch him again.”

“Ose,” Mal’ak blurts, not knowing until Ose looks at him that he’s going to tell him, “thank you.”

Ose stares at him with a conflicted look on his face and then sinks inexplicably to his knees. Mal’ak steps back after a moment and realizes he’s touching the spray of dried blood with his hands and leeching the evidence into himself.

“Uh.”

“What, are you embarrassed?” Ose teases.

“No,” Mal’ak says, affronted.

“Then you won’t mind me saying that you have a splendid taste,” he murmurs, peeking up at Mal’ak from under a dark curly fringe that matches Mal’ak’s.

Mal’ak opens his mouth, but his brain gives him nothing. Ose grins and finishes his work.

Ose leaves before sunrise. Mal’ak sits pensively at the entrance to Chimalli’s hut waiting for him to wake.

They’d been right to think Mal’ak was shaped into this skin because Ose would like it. The point was to bring them together and then to divide them. Mal’ak’s resistance, his reluctance to engage Ose, and his unwillingness to let this thing they have _be_ were trusted to be a more effective seduction ploy than if he had come down here looking to entice him.

Heaven could be such an ugly place. Sacrifice is a crucial element to any religion, and what are Ose and Mal’ak if not products of divinity?

That he sees the plan now—and simultaneously understands why he’s heard no encouragement or direction since he fell into the lake—should make him run from this before he ends up ensnared all the worse. He should tell Ose they’ve played right into a malicious game engineered to end them both.

He should deny this thing that is kindling between them. It would be right. Maybe it could save them both.

He _can_ save them. He can turn away from the fountain with which Ose showers him. Whatever affection that comes from Ose—whatever admiration, whatever twist of fantasy that loses itself in turns of obsession and strange desire—it does not require that Mal’ak participate. In fact, now that he understands, he would be better advised not to make himself complicit in his own damnation, but that’s just it. He is damned.

He _was_ selected for this. He was chosen die at the end of this journey just as much as Ose was.

Mal’ak waits for Chimalli to rise from his bed, eyes searching for any sign that Ose’s interference has not done its work to block the memory of last night. Chimalli smiles when he sees Mal’ak and asks if he’s eaten. Mal’ak gently waves him off and stays a while longer, hovering needlessly, protectively.

He walks down to the tiyānquiztli later, deciding something without fully considering the implications or the consequences but _needing_ to demonstrate something to himself and to Ose as well.

Mal’ak purchases a bag of salt the size of a large papaya and waits patiently all the rest of the morning for Ose to come to him by Lake Zumpango. It isn’t a regularly frequented place of theirs outside of the previous night. Mal’ak ignores what that says about the places they _do_ frequent and tells himself it has nothing to do with keeping those places pure of violence between them—real violence like that of the leopard.

Nothing whatsoever.

Ose comes to him at around noon. At first Mal’ak doesn’t recognize him. The stride is decidedly feminine and unknown. It bears more likeness to the host’s gait and pace than that familiar, cocky strut he has observed of Ose so often and come to expect.

“I thought you favored Xochimilco,” Ose says in the woman’s voice, eyes briefly flashing a dull, impossibly playful red. He looks happy and carefree. “These shores are so out of the way from where you fell.”

“I didn’t fall,” Mal’ak says through his teeth, irritated at himself for hesitating where his sweating hands clutch at the hefty bag of salt. It’s small but ample enough. It will undoubtedly cause some damage, not all of which will be physical—he hopes. “I was sent here. You know there’s a difference.”

There should have been a difference. He doesn’t know if he believes there ever was.

The woman’s burgundy lips smile like Ose can read his conflict clearly on his face. Perhaps he can. His host today is beautiful. Mal’ak hadn’t noticed at first.

“Being this far away from your central city puts you in a tempestuous mood, doesn’t it?”

Mal’ak breathes, gasps when he finds he can’t, and finds his courage somewhere in the battering ram of his heart. He heaves the opened bag in Ose’s face and watches the salt erupt overhead and cascade down the full length of the borrowed body. Every individual granule skates along the woman’s features, appearing to do no harm all while the unseen essence buries its hooks much deeper. Ose doesn’t move, doesn’t make a sound—except he _does_.

Like Chimalli’s silent scream, the visceral torture of abrasive salt eating at him has a preciously soft, intimate part of Ose _vibrating_. His scream is not a verbal one, but Mal’ak hears it louder than even the felled trees from last night.

Expecting Ose to leave the host to her bodily torment, Mal’ak isn’t prepared for the full force of that body slamming violently into his and pinning him on the ground. Her body is soft but heavy with gravity and impotent rage. Salt clings to Mal’ak where his palms have gone balmy with nervous sweat in between his fingers and under his nails. His agitation has weaponized his very hands, and yet he can’t lift them from where they are at his sides.

He’s held down by his shoulders. Mal’ak could push him off with his hands. He will, any second now. Mal’ak will move; he’ll throw Ose to the ground, and he’ll—Mal’ak will…he’ll…

Ose stares at him, expression betraying none of the wretched pain Mal’ak knows is shooting through his body in ugly, merciless waves that swell and swell but never relent. He tries to imagine if it’s anything like the wrenching pain of his bones filling out and breaking out of his body like a head of maize piercing through the earth to be born.

Ose’s fingers twitch rhythmically where his nails dig into skin without intention much like the leopard’s claws. His mouth—the woman’s mouth—opens as if to produce language, but nothing spills forth.

The burning continues, and Ose does make a sound. It is not a word, but it asks, _Why?_

It is a ridiculous question. Answering it would be almost redundant. Mal’ak finds his mouth open, too. His words, similarly, stay lodged in the back of his throat.

_Because I had to. I **have** to. Don’t you understand that there is no other way for us? What do you **mean** , why? Because, Ose. Because you know why. Because we die no matter what we do, and I’d rather die than know what it feels like to be taken from you. _

_Because I’m going to be taken from you._

_Ose._

“I don’t know,” drags out of his throat.

Fear rips the words directly from his heart. It’s only after he’s heard them in his own ears that he wishes he _had_ ripped them from his heart—wishes that the vessels, the veins, the arteries, the everything in there would have been wrenched out and left to bleed and bleed and bleed as they are with humans, as they were with Huitzilli’s son.

Ose’s face flickers twice like a dying flame, and for a long, horrible moment, Mal’ak feels his whole world crumble like ash. It’s just a taste of what their hell will be.

_You’re not supposed to die here,_ he almost says, wide-eyed. _We’re supposed to die together._

He can’t see a different end for them. Their war was not prophesied to end in this place, but they are meant to be instruments of each other’s deaths. Mal’ak has these assurances, but his fear—that despicable, self-murdering desire for this thing to never end—does not fade.

Didn’t Ose tell Mal’ak he was fashioned to be pleasing to his prey? Didn’t Mal’ak confess to his agreement of the fact? Didn’t Ose promise him that they would destroy this land trying to conquer one another?

Without an immediate thought for what he really intends to do, he reaches for Ose. He squeezes his eyes shut around the actual hiss of salt burning into his arms directly from the hands clutching at his skin. Mal’ak closes his eyes, too. The salt burns them both. Mal’ak can see himself too well not to see _why_ he burns when Ose does. He sees everything. 

_Can you see so far ahead?_ Ose had asked him.

_I wish I didn’t see anything._

_But you do see,_ Ose had insisted, patient and calm. _And nothing will ever change that._

Ose groans and squirms in the agonizing hold that only intensifies the longer he stays bound within it in a reversal of their roles from the night before. Mal’ak loosens his grip, but he keeps his hands where they are, skimming the raw rash of skin he’s wounded with his fingertips and grazing the irritation with the smooth shells of his fingernails. Ose sighs, shoulders slumping and long hair falling over both shoulders. His eyes droop closed and he collapses as if the last of his energy has gone out of him in a great gust of air.

Mal’ak drops his hands to the ground and heaves a sigh of his own, inordinately exhausted. They breathe, bodies wrapped up in one another and expanding where breath passes in and out, in and out, in and out.

Ose moves an endearingly shaky hand to Mal’ak’s limp arm on the ground coated in a fine layer of dirt. His palm smacks the hard earth and upsets a small cloud of dust. Mal’ak can barely see what he’s doing, but clammy fingers snake around a safe, dry spot on his forearm. Ose guides Mal’ak’s hand to the clothed juncture of hip and thigh, a very natural, easy handhold, especially with the way Ose’s knees are on either side—on either side of…

He peeks up at Mal’ak, dark hair stuck to the woman’s forehead and eyelids heavily lidded. His manner is almost shy, so amazingly demure and feminine that Mal’ak loses his breath just looking at him.

_Looking at her?_

The comfortable oval of humid breath where Ose’s mouth panted hot breaths into his shirt cools. This is wrong. It’s wrong. Mal’ak has the fleeting thought that he should run.

But then Ose is moving, inching up to be at level with Mal’ak so that their eyes meet easily. He can feel him breathing now. They are of the same breath. Their pulse is conjoined in this closeness. Mal’ak attempts hopelessly to disentangle from Ose, but his hand is held in place. The salt on his wrist touches and singes Ose worse for the hypersensitive state he has fallen into.

“Make me well,” Ose murmurs, a lost, half-feral look in his eyes that have edged from deep brown into black.

“But my hands—” Mal’ak starts to protest, understanding too late.

Too late to turn away from the kiss Ose lands too roughly in the center of his lips.

It’s a mistake. It is the worst thing that could ever have happened.

But as they pull apart, well before Mal’ak has even gathered his thoughts enough to be _able_ to heal Ose, as their eyes open wide at the sight of each other, as they blink in mutual fascination and damning curiosity, Mal’ak realizes it was not the worst thing that could have happened. As they catch their breath and watch for what the other will do, and as Mal’ak fists his hands helplessly in the skirts of the dress Ose is wearing, and even as remnants of salt on Ose’s lips make his blood boil in his veins, _this_ is the worst thing.

Seeing that _want_ doesn’t even begin to explain this frenzy—this _need_. Seeing that they have this and that it elates them equally like nothing else ever could. Seeing that it topples his insides more than Chimalli’s knife bisecting his abdomen or wings splitting his back. Seeing Ose see him.

It’s worse. It’s _worse_.

Mal’ak takes another shuddering breath as Ose does, fully cognizant of their bodies moving together, taking up the same space together, and fitting together in all the ways bodies were built to fit together. He licks his lips and Ose’s eyes track the quick movement of his tongue. Mal’ak pushes his shoulders against the ground, angles his chin, and rejoins their mouths in that union that causes them to burn in a wholly Other way.

He breathes in sharply through his nose at the contact. It’s better. God in heaven, but it’s _better._

Their lips separate after only a few seconds, each of them overwhelmed and panting frantically for air while their lips brush and their chins and noses bump. Mal’ak squirms, hearing nothing over their breathing and the rush of blood in his ears. He lifts his hands to Ose’s waist, buries one in long dark hair. Their lips press more urgently, breaking apart when Ose turns his face to hiss through his teeth.

“It’s in your knuckles,” he whispers.

Rather than speak, Mal’ak fits their mouths together again, relaxing into the ground and Ose’s weight on top of him as he takes back the hurt he sewed. It burns up inside of him differently, overripe to the taste more than bittersweet.

Ose relaxes, too, as the pain leeches out his skin. His jaw goes slack for a moment. Their foreheads touch in a relieved, disarmed moment of physical intimacy. Ose drags his fingers steadily down Mal’ak’s front until the angle of his elbow twists inward. His hand comes to rest between their bodies and squeezes where Mal’ak has become traitorously hard. Mal’ak bites his lip, humiliation steadily creeping over him. Ose leans in close and slowly, patiently flicks his tongue at the delicate slip of wet skin where his upper lip feeds into the inside.

His fingers knead. Mal’ak arches his back and bangs his head on the ground. When Ose kisses him again, he moans.

They moan together, the sound muffled and lost between lips, teeth, tongues crossing the thresholds of their mouths. Mal’ak pushes his fingers through Ose’s tangled hair and rolls his hips, unpracticed and clumsy in his movements but slowing where Ose steadies him and moving faster where Ose encourages him.

Ose fumbles with the fastenings over his pelvis, and Mal’ak, inexperienced as he is, knows how to do this part.

He should stop. They can still stop. There’s still a way to hide from this.

Except Ose moves and moves, and suddenly, quite suddenly, there is not a single place Mal’ak can conceive of claiming for a hiding place. There is no going back. There can’t be. He slips inside in one smooth rush, and as his whole body trembles and stretches taut as if with electricity, he knows he’s seen the whole world, from beginning to end and that he’s seen it because of Ose.

He’s seen violence and sacrifice and compromise and patience and impatience and agony and balm. He’s seen himself.

Ose furthers that ever-rising, poisonous heat inside of them with expert grace. His loosely gathered skirts brush Mal’ak’s stomach and the tops of his thighs, the material scratchy like wool. When he bends down to kiss Mal’ak his hair falls in both their faces and sticks to their shining, foreign skins that glisten reptilian in the waning daylight. When he touches Ose with his hands, he doesn’t burn. Neither of them does, except for in the one way that Mal’ak hopes they’ll never stop.

And that, right there, as if he needed it spelled out for him, is the single catalyst for his destruction. The beginning of the end of them has come with this submission to carnal desire. Mal’ak doesn’t last long at all before he feels himself spilling over. He can’t summon the willpower to be ashamed for it, not when Ose makes a strangled sound of gratification in between a moan and a laugh.

Ose kisses his forehead, his eyebrows, the curve of his cheekbone, and his chin. Mal’ak breathes and kisses back when their lips meet again. It takes Ose gingerly separating their link for Mal’ak to go cold all over and realize what they’ve done. He scrambles out from under Ose’s body—his stolen body—mid-kiss.

“Oh,” he starts to say, horrified beyond words at the woman’s face looking at him with Ose’s eyes. “Oh, God.”

“What can your Father do to us that we won’t do to each other, Mal’ak?” Ose says, clearly rolling his eyes though Mal’ak can’t bear look at him. 

“I just…you aren’t…she can’t…”

“No, I’m afraid not,” Ose says after a moment, hesitant to admit it but doing so anyway. “She felt nothing, Akh. She _knows_ nothing. None of them do.”

“Do you think that makes this okay?” Mal’ak interrupts him, panic coursing through his body and shocking his heart. “Do you think that makes this less horrid? You _aren’t_ this body!”

“No, I’m not. We’ve had this conversation.”

Mal’ak licks his lips, scrambling still to catch a full breath of air. Ose’s jaw clenches twice. He looks away.

“Would you like me to be?”

“…What?”

“You’ve seen what I am,” Ose says in a small voice. “I’m not this.”

“I…” Mal’ak frowns and slowly shakes his head, trying to conceive of a way to tell Ose how wrong his assumption is. “ _She’s_ not _you_.”

Ose searches his eyes like there is not a single thing in the whole of the cosmos that is more important than whether Mal’ak is telling him the truth. He doesn’t smile at what he sees, but Mal’ak can tell he hasn’t been misinterpreted this time. They drop their locked gazes and look at everything outside of each other.

“Do you mean to tell me we can’t do this again?”

Mal’ak grits his teeth. Ose looks up, probably having heard them click in his mouth.

“We can’t.”

“Only dumu Aĝ could imagine black and white lines in the actions of aḫḫāzu,” he mutters bitterly, more to himself than to Mal’ak.

“What are you talking about?”

“Huitzilli’s child, your wings, Chimalli’s nightmares—these things are good because we suffer for them. They are the hideous side of both our natures, and this makes it acceptable in your mind. You walk with me in the light, forgetting what I am because it allows you to be near me without guilt, but a simple pleasure stolen by the same means and suddenly our union is abhorrent to you. _You_ are the hypocrite, Mal’ak.”

“Do you think I enjoy holding this in front of you and telling you you’ll never have it again?” Mal’ak seethes back at him, fixing his fastenings and his belt indignantly. “You aren’t of your own body, Ose. You have no right to give any of this to me! I have no right to take it from you!”

Ose continues to stare at him like he sees something Mal’ak doesn’t or that he can’t yet. It scares him because although he trusted Ose before, the twisting, irreversible pain inside his chest is more than obsession and fear twisted together. It’s devotion.

Mal’ak _has_ fallen. He is every bit the devil he will someday kill in Ose. They are two devils. Neither one has any intention of dispatching the other. They have arrived unwillingly at an impasse with the taste of decadent perdition sticking to the roofs of their mouths.

“What is it to this city if another child dies?” Ose murmurs darkly.

He storms past Mal’ak on foot in the general direction of Tenochtitlan. Mal’ak bites his lip and sits by the water rubbing his hands into his legs for needless warmth. His body hasn’t cooled down yet. Their argument kept his blood pumping through his veins.

Mal’ak bows his head and does what he should have done a long time ago. He prays.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cuauhtémoc is a Nahuatl name that means Descending Eagle; Chimalli means Shield; Huitzilli is Hummingbird; tiyānquiztli is a marketplace; tlilxochitl is a vanilla orchid; pitahaya is dragon fruit; Ḫasīs is possession (comprehension, wisdom); aḫḫāzu is a demon
> 
> >>Let me know if I forgot to note any—most of these have been defined in previous chapters
> 
> Tudela Codex sacrifice by heart extraction (Fig. 15)  
> http://www.famsi.org/reports/05054/05054ChavezBalderas01.pdf 
> 
> Hijo de la chingada > like son of a bitch, but closer to ‘son of a raped woman’ (yeah, it’s terrible, and I apologize, but it’s supposed to be terrible—and historical).
> 
> The mid-air embrace is based on _Tangled Up in You_ by Beth Cavener Stichter  
>  http://hifructose.com/2014/02/24/beth-cavener-stichter-and-alessandro-gallo-collaborate-on-ornate-sculpture/


	6. A Thing Called Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will meets an unexpected stranger and regains the full force of his powers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _It can lift you up, never let you down / Take your world and turn it around / Ever since time nothing’s ever been found / That’s stronger than love_
> 
>  
> 
> And voices in me said, If you were a man  
> You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.
> 
> But must I confess how I liked him,  
> How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough  
> And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,  
> Into the burning bowels of this earth?
> 
> Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?  
> I felt so honoured.
> 
> And yet those voices:  
> If you were not afraid, you would kill him!
> 
> And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more  
> That he should seek my hospitality  
> From out the dark door of the secret earth.  
> \--D.H. Lawrence, “Snake”

Will visits Abel frequently once he can drive unsupervised. When Jack doesn’t have him actively working cases, his time belongs to him alone. They’ve talked about trying to find something for him to do between cases, but Will’s frankly nonexistent background makes employment options scarce. As it is, Kade Prurnell barely sanctions his consultation on the few cases Jack’s toted him along for since the fiasco with Garret Jacob Hobbs. Probably the only reason she let him stay on like she has is that they’d managed to save Abigail even as the parents both were lost.

Suffice to say, he has a lot of downtime when the BAU doesn’t need him. Now that Abigail’s awake, and slightly less inclined to let him play the part of an over-protective gargoyle, his options are stay at home with the dogs or roam the wilds of civilization until Lloyd gets off work. He has been to see Abigail once or twice, always with Alana nearby in case he does or says something disastrous, but his heart calls him to Abel. It’s a strange thing to no longer be repelled by him as they were in the beginning, but perhaps Arad has had more lingering effects than Will wanted to acknowledge in the beginning.

Abel is, not surprisingly, unhappy to see him. Nothing changes in that respect as their meetings drag on, and Chilton refuses them the backroom that allowed them to speak so freely in the past, rendering any attempt Will could make to remind Abel of who he is utterly impossible. Will doesn’t lose heart. If he were in Abel’s place, he wouldn’t want his one lifeline to give up on him for something he could do nothing to bounce back from. Time would repair the harm done. Will had to hope it would.

“Do you have friends in here?” he asks, one inquiry of about a dozen that have gone unanswered. Abel doesn’t even look at him from behind the bars of his iron cage. He isn’t the defeated prisoner he’s been acting the part of since Will returned from Minnesota; it’s painful to watch. “There must be other prisoners on your cellblock that you’ve spoken to. The walls aren’t that thick.”

Will considers reaching out with his hands or with the subtler touch of his mind, but he’s been having less success hearing other people’s thoughts since the encephalitis. He figures it’s a side effect of the inflammation and the subsequent seizure he suffered. Apparently he’d had it for a while, and once the doctors told him what the symptoms were, he readily believed that he had. He’d lost flashes of time and had had many fevers burn him through the nights. Abel hadn’t believed that he was sick, but Will never lost sight of the physical evidence just like Beverly taught him.

Ose is a master of the mind and perception, but he couldn’t create or remove maladies. Long ago in Tenochtitlan his influence had helped calm Will down enough to shake his wings back into arms, but his touch was never anything more than suggestion and clarity. If he had pushed Will into a seizure, then it was ultimately for his benefit as it allowed the doctors to diagnose him with encephalitis in the first place. 

He wouldn’t defend Ose in an argument, but he can see the rationale behind what had been done to him. Ose needed a tactical retreat to avoid detection and detainment. Will’s hospitalization gave him just that and more. It gave him the chance he needed to run.

Will suspects he deserves it. After all, he had abandoned Ose first—abandoned him for hundreds of years. It wasn’t his choice, but it doesn’t matter.

“I don’t have any friends,” Abel drawls, interrupting the silence and Will’s train of thought.

“Who are the other guys on your cellblock?”

“Hmm, other men with sickly mentalities,” Abel says dismissively. “We lost one a while back to a fairly tame mental institution—not like this place.”

“Oh. Did you know him well?”

Abel chuckles darkly. “Mr. Brown did.”

Will glances Matthew’s way. He’s leaning against the wall by the doors into the huge room with cages twirling his keys on one finger. Abel laughs again, catching Will’s attention.

“And here I thought you were indifferent to his affections. That won’t end well.”

“What—wait.” Will sits up a bit and stares at Abel, leaning in when the latter turns to look away. Baldly he asks, “How do you know about his affections?” 

Abel makes him wait. Will battles his curiosity and his mounting sense of impatience, and eventually, he is rewarded. Quietly, like he doesn’t want to admit it, Abel tells him, “I remembered some things.”

“What? What did you remember?”

Distrustfully, Abel says, “I remember you were telling me a story from long ago.” Will breathes in and out, slowing his heartbeat when it tries to run away from him. Abel doesn’t look at him. “I remember telling you about my life before this.”

It isn’t especially like Abel to be purposely ambiguous. He has a tendency to talk in circles, yes, but he usually has an underlying point at the end. Considering the options at hand, Will presumes Abel is being mindful of the listening devices in the room that give Chilton unfettered access to their conversation. Matthew had told him initially that they would need to speak in code, and while it takes Will a moment to decipher what Abel is trying to tell him, he thinks he gets the shape of things.

Abel remembers their talk of Tenochtitlan, limited as it was, and he remembers telling Will about the Vitalis family—about his being Šenmeû. The only reason they would be talking about either of those things is if Will is like Abel was—a modernized Mal’ak ha-mashḥit to Abel’s Kamael. He must know why Will is here if he remembers those two things. To look at him, though, doesn’t inspire a lot of optimism.

His eyes are guarded and his posture defensive. He doesn’t trust Will, even after his memory has begun to come back. If it is a side effect of Arad, then it, too, will heal with time. Until then, Will can only continue to be patient. Abel remembers him. That’s plenty for now.

Will hears the door by Matthew open a few moments later but doesn’t look up at the sound of approaching footsteps. Chilton hasn’t been making it easy for Will to reconnect with Abel, and if he’s bitter about it, he really can’t be blamed. The footsteps stop beside his chair and a hand rests firmly on his shoulder. Will stifles an urge to jump and looks up at Dr. Lecter.

“Oh, did I miss an appointment?”

“No, Will, Jack is looking for you. Apparently you aren’t answering your phone.”

Will pats his pockets and frowns. He must have left the phone in Lloyd’s car. “Is there a case?”

Dr. Lecter takes his hand away when Will stands and nods his head yes. He gets his coat off the back of the chair and starts to say his rushed goodbyes, only to stop short: “Abel…”

He follows Abel’s sightline to Dr. Lecter and frowns. The look on Abel’s face is blank but his eyes are sharp with some emotion Will can’t place just by looking at him. It isn’t fear, though that’s Will’s first guess; it looks more like comprehension—a deep understanding of something Will isn’t seeing.

“Uh, this is Dr. Lecter. He’s my psychiatrist. This is Abel Gideon.”

“Will has told me much about you,” Dr. Lecter says on cue. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Dr. Gideon.”

“Yes,” Abel murmurs, looking between Will and Dr. Lecter before his expression locks down into cold hardness again. He offers a terse laugh. “Charmed, I’m sure. Forgive me for staring. Chilton’s had me on downers and sedatives since last week. He’ll switch to uppers when the temperatures start to climb.”

“Perhaps I should speak to him about that.”

Will glances at his doctor, mildly stunned and skeptical. “You’d do that?”

“We are colleagues. I have reason to believe he’ll hear my counsel.”

“I didn’t think anyone liked Chilton.”

Abel laughs behind his hand, and Will remembers they’re being recorded. Feeling a blush creep up his neck, he clears his throat, mutters half a parting farewell to Abel, and walks with Dr. Lecter to the doors. Matthew lets him go without interference. Will isn’t aware of any prior interactions between them or if they have ever even been introduced, but Dr. Lecter doesn’t look twice at Matthew and Matthew does nothing to stop them from leaving.

Outside, away from Chilton’s equipment, Will asks, “What’s the case? Do you know?”

“He only mentioned that the son of a judge has been found murdered in Delaware.”

“Are you coming with us?” Will asks a little too hopefully.

“Not this time,” Dr. Lecter replies softly, catching his concern immediately. Work hasn’t come to a standstill since the Hobbs case, but it’s always on Will’s mind. It was the first time he’d killed anyone after the fall. By comparison, none of the others he’s been responsible for feel even remotely real. “You’ll be fine, Will.”

They stand in the parking lot for a while. Will can’t say why, but Dr. Lecter doesn’t make any attempt to leave and neither does Will. He supposes it’s his doing; Dr. Lecter is just being a good caregiver and making sure Will is all right to drive—that he doesn’t need anything before they part ways, potentially for a week if not longer. Their appointment was scheduled for the day after tomorrow, but Will frankly doesn’t see that happening.

Calmly, with a tone of authority and reassurance, Dr. Lecter tells him, “If at any point in time you need guidance, you know how to reach me.”

Will, oddly, accepts the offer. He isn’t sure he’ll collect on it, but it’s a nice thought that Dr. Lecter makes himself available for the possibility since they’re bound to miss their session on Friday.

“Will we be rescheduling this week’s appointment?”

“We can decide when you return. For now, focus your attention on the case.”

Will leaves once it feels appropriate and drives back to Quantico to meet up with Jack for a rundown of the situation in Wilmington. It turns out a handful of dead sex workers has cropped up all around the city in the last few months. The death of a judge’s son, a guidance counselor at a small high school, brought attention to the slayings of four sex workers in the area—the fifth had been discovered in conjunction with the dead counselor, Hayes, which linked the other four to him as well.

It doesn’t take Will long to see it. Racham Hayes Junior led a modest life, treated his students respectfully, and often lent his hands in service to the community. The smear campaign working against his father, the judge, paints Racham as a man with secrets leading a double life and corrupting the minds of his students. There’s a heated publicity battle between the school and the media. His students say he was a kind, good man and a hero; the journalists call him a degenerate who sold his flesh along with the five sex workers now connected to his murder.

Some say Racham Hayes Junior was a vigilante killer. Others say he was the ringleader of a suicide cult. The theories people spout out when armed with so little information is truly pitiful. If it wasn’t such a disservice to the younger Racham Hayes’ character, it would be laughable.

Will pulls Jack aside after just one press conference given by the Commissioner of Police and tells him his first impression. Based on the delicately worded speech and the files he read on the flight over, he decides Racham Hayes Junior was not at any point in time a sex worker for need, personal pleasure, or coercion. The facts of his résumé make that point obvious enough. Racham liked his job, was in a committed relationship with a traditionally beautiful woman, and had a spotless record before his murder.

When Judge Hayes steps up to deliver his remarks on the developments in his son’s case, Will steps away from Jack and watches the father closely. Beverly and Lloyd stand on either side of him, and having them there so close by helps him focus on what matters and tune out what feels inconsequential.

A few people farther back from the reporters in the front yell in outrage at Judge Hayes’ admission that his son had been acting strangely the last few months. He says he suspected he had been using drugs again. Beverly catches Will’s arm before he can charge the podium at the word ‘again’—at the outright lie of it. The collective anger and confusion of the people at his back is overwhelming. He feels almost like he needs to sit, and not a moment too soon, Beverly and Lloyd are carting him off to a barren garden with a curved concrete circle enclosing it.

“Are you saying you like the judge for these murders? Because that is one scandal I would absolutely love to crack open,” Zeller muses later at the station they’re set up at. He rubs his hands together and looks through the files again before producing a photograph of Judge Racham Hayes to pin on the dry erase board. He draws a red line between him and the first victim, Micah Abbandonato. “If he thought his son was turning tricks, that could be bad for PR.”

“If he did think that, then the thing to do would be to deny any such allegations, not add fuel to the fire,” Beverly counters, rising to flick little dashed spaces in the red line Zeller drew to make it obviously more tenuous. She turns to Will. “You thought he was lying at the press conference. Want to talk about that?”

“What he said about his son wasn’t true, _and_ it was a lie.”

“So he knew he was lying,” Price translates. “Because he didn’t believe it or because he _knew_ it to be untrue?”

“I can’t tell yet. I don’t think he knows about the other murders, but whatever it is that had his son tangled up in the investigation, he should be able to give us something.”

“That’s better than nothing,” Beverly says, turning to Jack. “What do you think?”

“Will and I’ll take the judge. Beverly, I want you back on fibers with Monahan. Price, Zeller: I want the prints and toxicology reports from the first and last crime scenes—see where the differences and similarities are. Bowman, check Hayes’ financial records and confirm his whereabouts the night of the murder.”

“Wait, Judge Hayes or Hayes Junior?” Lloyd asks with twitching fingers.

Considering the question, Jack says, “Both.”

They embark on their individual missions. Will mostly observes Jack’s interactions with Judge Hayes when they interview him at his home. He was instructed in the car not to speak too bluntly or they might lose their ‘in’. Political types, Jack tells him, have a tendency to clam up when faced with too much truth. The irony of it stimulates Will’s curiosity for the entirety of their thirty-five minute talk.

As they’re driving back to the precinct, Jack receives a text from Beverly which he asks Will to read for him. Apparently Hayes Junior and Caleb Sandoval, the second murdered sex worker, had a flower in common. Both had traces of _C. hadriaticus parnonicus_ pollen on their clothing at the time of death.

“So they either saw the same florist, or they were in an area where that flower grows,” Jack says, sounding skeptical or perhaps just overwhelmed.

“Beverly says that type of flower wouldn’t have survived the type of winter Delaware had. At the time of the second victim’s death, it couldn’t have been naturally in bloom. They—” Will reads her next two texts that come in. “She says they had to have gone to one of two specialty bulb suppliers in Newark or Claymont.”

“If Hayes drove Sandoval to the bulb supplier, I could see that working, but on foot or taking public transportation, that’s a hell of a trip.”

“None of them had vehicles?”

“The third one did—Bennett Bosch.”

“So what does this say for the case?”

“That they met there, hopefully. If we can find surveillance footage of them together and establish a solid connection, then we can prove they knew each other and that they kept company with one another on occasion.”

Will sits back in his seat to ruminate over the facts, tapping the back of the phone lightly with one finger. When Zeller and Price get something for them to use, the picture will become much clearer. For now, everything is sort of confused and muddled.

Zeller likes the judge for the killings, Jack likes Hayes Junior’s boss, and Will can’t decide which theory he favors less. Neither of them sounds quite right, and while the judge’s interview was more inconclusive than helpful—politician, Jack reminded him when he saw how frustrated Will was, Will isn’t exactly leaning toward him as a prime suspect. Beverly’s taken a position of waiting for an as-yet unidentified suspect. She says the evidence doesn’t sway too much in any one person’s direction, and Will is inclined to take her word for it.

Right now Jack is bringing Will to the most recent crime scene—an apartment complex where the fifth sex worker lived. Jack walks up to the third floor with him, takes down the yellow tape for Will to step through, and waits in the hallway. Hayes Junior and Lucian Hirst were stabbed to the death and strangled, respectively, in the kitchen and hallway. Will walks twice through the large empty apartment trying to focus in on the details. It isn’t in complete disarray, but it isn’t tidy either. Jack reported that no drugs had been found on the scene, and neither victim had anything more extreme in their system than the lingering tint of THC.

In spite of the slight blood spatter affixed to one wall, the scene Hayes Junior and Hirst left behind didn’t bear the wiry tension of drug-related violence. The air didn’t spin in Will’s blood with that kind of addled fury.

While the rest of his abilities appear to need time to mend after the encephalitis—and while Will holds out hope that they _would_ return when that time elapsed—he hasn’t lost his capacity to experience the full extent of beauty and pain in the blindness of death. He could still look at a dead body and _feel_ the lash of a blade cutting him or the residual thrill of fear, anger, or acceptance coursing through him in the final moments.

Empathy is a learned skill for most humans, and he supposes he knew it, too, instinctively. Practice made it a tool he could wield and conversely, one that he could share with others without inflicting harm. His touch for death, on the other hand, is second nature. That’s the thing he was created with before he had a face or voice or name. Before any other part of him could think, his power and purpose already existed. The empathy is a parting gift from Tenochtitlan, from the only other time in his long life when he was human.

Before and after that time, he hadn’t known what it meant to be one of them. Even now, he wonders. Is it a blessing? Is it a nuisance? Is it a disease that promises death?

Humanity tells him that Hayes died alerting Hirst of the person who would kill them both; physical evidence tells him that entry was not forced. A combination of the two disciplines tells him Hayes _knew_ his killer. It all slots into place with the acknowledgement of that single obvious detail. He’d read over it in the police report but hadn’t seen it for a necessary clue until he could see it in person.

Hayes was with Hirst in this apartment and it wasn’t the first time. Whoever it was that came to see them surprised him but not to the point of being perceived a threat. Hayes’ personal effects—a briefcase and an empty tote—were laid casually on the kitchen table before his death. Will checks the cabinets and the fridge for the groceries he’s sure he’ll find there.

_I was trying to help them. I’ve been gravely misunderstood._

A rift happens in Will’s mind where his focus slips away from Hayes and toward the person who murdered him. The apartment goes dark before surging with light as if it were bathed in clarity. Will looks down at the blood smeared on his hands between his fingers and up his wrist. It isn’t the same sort of elation that buzzes wantonly in his skin as he felt in the days before his fall. The sickening lurch in his gut reminds him of vertigo, not of relaxed satiation or muted happiness. He’s afraid and his hands tremble.

Slowly, so slowly, the seconds move backward and he sees the scene unfold in reverse. He barely registers the splash of blood on his face before the rewound ribbon of time flicks it off of him. Hirst runs from the room, motions inverted to account for the unraveling seconds. Hayes rises from his knees and drops his hands. There’s a smile on his face in the seconds before the storm unfolds.

_He’s happy to see me. We have much to discuss._

Will can’t imagine the conversation, but as they’re standing there alone in the room, the motive slots into place. Hayes associated with the other slain men. He came to the fifth victim’s home where the murderer intended to kill Hirst.

_He wasn’t supposed to be here._

The thick black handle protruding from a knife block slides under his hand. Local police identified the murder weapon as a bread knife—the only one missing from Hirst’s kitchen.

_I stab him four times. He tries to talk me down. It doesn’t work. He tries to fight me. It doesn’t work. He’s afraid and angry because nothing works. Nothing can stop me doing this to him._

The neighbors at the time of the murder had heard a scream. They’d dismissed it as being somehow related to Hirst’s profession and no one had called it in. A few people wanted to, but they thought someone else might see to the matter instead.

_The screaming brings Hirst into the kitchen. He’s small and easily incapacitated. I take my time with him. Hayes is dying but not he’s still conscious when I strangle Hirst. He sees it happen. There’s nothing he can do. This is the way it must be._

Will walks to the door, vaguely perplexed in the midst of his imagined sequence of events. Someone had heard a scream, but not a single person came to investigate?

“Jack?” he asks, voice thick and hot tears stinging his eyes.

He opens the door to the hallway as Jack’s stepping into the cleared doorway. Will holds the edge of the door awkwardly in his gloved hand, squinting at the pale latex perched on the dark wooden door and frowning at Jack.

“What did you see?”

“Uh…” Will clears his throat twice. “The victims weren’t sexually assaulted?”

“No, none of them.”

Will rubs the back of his wrist over his forehead. He hadn’t sensed sexual motivations in his mind’s re-imagining of the scene, but there was something more to what he did notice.

People thought it was related to Hirst’s occupation.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, did the police talk to the other tenants? We’re sure nobody came knocking on this door during or after the murders?”

“All the tenants are accounted for.”

“We need to look into Hirst’s friends and family.” Will taps on the door restlessly with the tips of his fingers. “Someone was here. Before he was through, our guy got a visitor. He had to play it off like he was a customer. Someone _saw_ his face, Jack.”

They comb through Hirst’s private life for the rest of the day and the following morning. The name they come up with is Mara Horowitz, aged 19. Will hasn’t slept by the time they go to interview her. Jack advises him to take a backseat since he’s not at full power, which hurts except Jack probably doesn’t mean it any way that _should_ cause Will to take offense.

“Some guy answered the door in a towel,” she tells them. Will looks around at the pictures on her wall, letting Beverly take the seat next to Jack on the couch. Her apartment is small and clean with minimalistic furniture and décor. “I figured he’d be busy for the next while. When I went back, Hirst wasn’t home—or I guess…no, that’s pretty much right, isn’t it?”

They take Mara Horowitz into protective custody and start looking for the man she describes to the sketch artist. The local cops are adamant about finding the murderer themselves, so Will hides out in the spectator’s side of the connecting interrogation rooms to stay out of their way. Feeling stubborn, he decides to call Dr. Bloom instead of Dr. Lecter.

“How goes the investigation?” she asks after a moment when they’ve been silent for a spell.

“Jack thinks we found the person responsible. We found someone who saw his face, so the police are looking for him.”

She makes a soft sound very nearly like a laugh. “You sound bored.”

“I don’t have a badge. I can’t do anything unless Jack is right there with me.”

“Maybe you should get a badge,” she says lightly, partly teasing him and he suspects, partly serious.

“Dr. Lecter’s told me that I struggle with instability issues.”

A bit stiffly, she says, “Oh.”

“He said low-stress working environments would be better suited to my temperament. Do you think he’s right?”

“Will, I think what you do should be your choice.” Her words come slowly, carefully. “You have to know that there are always going to be people who disagree with what you do, and for good reason: it’s dangerous work.”

He waits a beat and says, “You agree with Dr. Lecter.”

“It isn’t my place to pass judgment or to decide for you what your life is going to be. You’re here now and no one is in control of your life but you.”

He’s come to understand as much about himself and this new life he’s been given. As long as it took him to see it as life, it is his life just like Dr. Bloom says.

Having it confirmed does something airy and funny to his heart. Before he can speak on what he’s feeling, there’s movement in the room on the other side of the glass from him that pulls his attention—a female police officer escorting what looks to be a teenage girl into a seat at the table. The officer leaves and the girl pillows her arms in front of herself. Will can make out the soft sound of her crying.

“How did you decide what you wanted to do?” he asks instead of voicing the lofty emotions he’s found himself assaulted with. “Were you young when you knew?”

“I was in high school,” she admits after a moment, and he thinks he can hear a fond note in her answer.

Will looks at the girl in interrogation scrubbing her sleeve at the inky black smudged down her cheeks. “Sixteen, seventeen?”

“Something like that. I just knew I wanted to help people. Psychiatry came into the picture when I went off to college. It broadened my horizons.”

Will’s seen all the horizons the world has to offer. He’s seen the sunrises and sunsets, the dusks and the dawns, and he’s seen day and night from every time period in the history of mankind. He’s seen the horizons that tapered off over mountaintops, horizons that climbed cityscapes, and horizons that stretched on in every direction: horizons of trees, oceans, desert sands, and grassy hills and valleys.

When he was young—and he was young once—nothing made him feel more powerful than the solitary act of bearing witness to the world, testing those horizons until they broke off into newer, ever-changing segments of the universe.

Knowledge certainly is power. He can see how it would empower a young person to take hold of their future.

The girl in interrogation sniffles once and fixes her hair.

“Somehow I don’t see you having that problem in a physical sense.”

“But in a metaphorical sense?”

A clean-cut, well-dressed woman carrying a leather satchel on one shoulder and a sizeable file in her free hand walks into the interrogation room. Her deep blue coat is slung over that arm and when she sets it all down across from the now-composed teenage girl, she is the perfect picture of calm and self-assurance. Will stares dumbly for a moment and then clumsily traipses out into the noisy hallway.

“In a metaphorical sense, I think you’re hanging onto a much older side of yourself that you’re no longer obligated to identify with.”

“Hard to let go of one’s destiny,” he murmurs, navigating through the station until he ends up outside. 

“Because you don’t want to or because you’re afraid?”

_Both,_ he doesn’t say.

A squad car drives up and two local officers bring in the man from Mara Horowitz’s sketch. Will stays where he is on the sidewalk outside the station. The last time he followed a suspect inside, he ended up shot, and while he’d rather be the one to take that bullet if it happens again, he’s worried he might not survive an attack on his body with the way the rest of him has been acting up lately.

“I should probably go. They just brought our suspect in.”

“Be careful, Will.”

“Yeah, okay.”

He hangs up and stares forlornly at the sky, distrustful of the police station at his back—Dr. Lecter pointed out that these structures could be potential triggers for him after the events with Lottie Tasse—and upset about the anxiety rippling through his body in increasingly larger and larger waves. He feels unsettled, like parts of him are about to catch in the cold breeze outside and float away on the wind. His phone is warm in his pocket from use.

The sky is a deep gray color overhead. The clouds look fit to burst with rain. Delaware’s been seeing a lot of rain since they’ve been here. With the temperature rising the closer to spring they get, most of the storms they’ve encountered have been rainy, not snowy. Overhead, there’s a rumble of thunder and Will feels a deep tremor inching down his spine. Dr. Lecter hadn’t named thunder storms for a trigger, but perhaps he hadn’t needed to. Perhaps the ominous workings of the celestial sphere would always terrify Will at a primordial level.

In spite of his instinctual, lingering fear of storms, the almost spearmint smell of approaching rain is crisp and soothing to his senses. It mingles nicely with the constant whisper of vehicles on the road, slowing to stop and accelerating and endlessly repeating like a stream.

His phone buzzes with a text from Jack. He likes their current suspect, Raphael de la Fuente. Will pockets his phone, glad for it.

A few minutes later, Jack calls him.

“You need to come in here.”

Will almost doesn’t hear what he says over a harsh crack of thunder. “What? Why?”

“He’s asking to speak to Mal’ak.”

Will runs inside with a scant few raindrops in his hair and wetting the shoulders of his jacket. He can hear the wind pick up through the closing door, but he’s moving away from it fast enough that he doesn’t see the bolt of lightning far off so much as he sees the flash of it dust over the walls. The lights flicker. Jack’s standing outside a door to an interrogation room with another local officer when Will finds him down one of the halls.

“How do you want to do this?” they ask at the same time.

“Did he say who he was?” Will tries when Jack waves for him to speak.

“Raphael de la Fuente,” Jack says, shaking his head. “He doesn’t appear to be violent, but he’s killed six people. I’m not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt here.”

Will scrubs his hand over his mouth. “Okay, just me. You can go in the attached room if you need to, but this is between me and him.”

“Are you sure you’re all right to go in there?”

He feels provoked, frightened, and tightly wound, but he’s all right. Someone is calling him by name; it doesn’t matter if he feels fit to die. He’s going in there no matter what. Jack appears to understand and doesn’t press. He just gestures with his hand for Will to wait and strides into the adjacent room. The officer at his post by the door stays put, but he won’t be a problem.

Beverly and the team must be combing through de la Fuente’s personal effects for evidence linking him to the murders because they’re nowhere to be seen now. Will steels himself, wipes his sweating hands on his shirt, and enters the room.

Raphael de la Fuente is not imposing by any means, but there is a quiet power to him that Will immediately appreciates. There’s no room for Will to feel any other way about it. He commands respect by the mere fact of his presence, which is reined in and easily subdued. Will has been unable to detect this kind of aura in anyone since he woke up from his coma. He still can’t quite pick up anything preternatural about de le Fuente, but it’s there demanding to be noticed all the same. Will recognizes that ability even if he is physically incapable of obeying the full force of its command.

“You’re patesi,” he says through a shiver.

De la Fuente smiles, if the slight shiver of movement over his mouth could be called a smile. It makes sense. Patesis are always incredibly obvious once they’ve been identified—the hollow shine of their solemn, withered eyes and the eerie stillness of their bodies could scarcely belong to any other kind of being. Will’s seen humans and fallen ones come close, but outside of those category, patesis are the only ones who carry their pain with them for all to see.

“Hello, Mal’ak,” he murmurs, soft-spoken and oddly mild-mannered considering his offenses. “So you’ve found me.”

“You let me find you,” Will counters, fully aware by now that nothing with patesis is ever done by accident. Will’s being here is not by chance. Neither is de la Fuente’s. “Is that why you killed those people?”

He licks his lips and slowly shakes his head. Will hesitates a few seconds where he’s still standing by the door and cautiously takes the seat across from de la Fuente. He feels put on the spot as soon as their eyes meet. Being at level with this person who is both murder suspect and patesi, Will can only be aware of the latter fact. As much as he knows it _does_ matter that de la Fuente may be a serial killer, his status as patesi is worlds more important to Will.

No wonder he fell.

“Do you come bearing prophecy?” Will asks softly, whispering almost for the reverence living within his lungs that he can’t bypass.

De la Fuente doesn’t move, but the answer in the gentle flash of his eyes is a sound _yes_.

“About…”

“Yes, ezbu.”

Will swallows and opens his mouth only for the room to go pitch black. He blinks into the darkness and hears someone try the door seconds later only for the lock mechanism to keep them out. A hand finds its way into his hair, and rather than flinching away from it, Will relaxes into that touch, trusting in the divinity that operates through this stolen, calculated moment not to harm him. Someone pounds on the door outside and Will closes his eyes against the overwhelming net of black suffocating his sight.

“The one called Ose will reveal himself to you,” de la Fuente whispers confidentially. “He must not know that you see him.”

“But I can’t—”

The briefest spark of pain lights through his skull and ripples pleasantly. Immediately after that balmy moment passes, the presence a mere few feet away radiates outward like the blinding light from a beacon. Unlike with aḫḫāzu and dumu Aĝ, the strong pulse of the patesi before him _is_ magnetic. He feels drawn and addicted, as if furthering that touch in his hair even just a little would make him well enough to fly.

But that hand retreats in the next instant, its purpose complete.

“Who sent us here?” Will can see the edges of de la Fuente shimmering in the dark in a way he couldn’t before. “I don’t understand.”

“It isn’t for you to know the truth. You’ll discover it, when it comes to you.”

The lights flicker on and Jack flings the door open, looking flustered and agitated but overall relieved when Will is visibly okay. Will gives de la Fuente a questioning glance and stands to his feet at the blank, empty look he gets in return. Their exchange is finished. Will looks at Jack and pushes that thought toward him—the sense of balance he feels, the renewed focus he has. Jack’s response is to frown, but his expression changes abruptly for one of awareness.

_You knew I was damaged,_ Will thinks, keeping the emotion attached to that thought close to his chest. _You knew and you would have kept it from me._

Was he really expected to know so little about his body and his mind?

He had missed the encephalitis, but trained doctors had missed it, too. Only Ose felt the dull heat of it. Ose had been the one to push him into an unavoidable symptom, forcing him to seek treatment for the illness.

On his way out of the precinct he sees the teenage girl’s lawyer speaking with a heavyset police officer and stops when they both look up at him. Their faces flicker for a handful of seconds. Although Will’s blood runs cold at the sight of their curious stares, he takes a breath and walks past them for the door. They let him go. When he turns to look back at them, their eyes don’t follow his retreat.

He’s on edge after the warning he’s received. He expects—he _wants_ —to see Ose at every turn. Even as his warning was to play at ignorance, word from patesis is even better than a guarantee. It is a pact, an oath, contrived beyond his reach in the higher parts of heaven he doesn’t answer to anymore.

Will drives Beverly’s car back to the motel. She’d assured him earlier that day that she could ride back with Price and Zeller if he needed to take it. Before he saw the proof of it, she probably surmised, correctly, that he would not be quite as active in this investigation as they are.

He sits in his room at their designated motel for four hours looking out the window and remembering inconsequential bits and pieces from his life before and after Ḫa-lam. Not for the first time, he wonders why he was really spared the fate his like usually suffer at their weakest moments.

Dull fear sits in his stomach like a coal on the way to burning out. No one followed him back from the precinct. He tells himself he’s safe and that even if he’s not, at least he can partly defend himself now.

He wonders about the lawyer and the police officer—if they have a life in those bodies or if they’re spectating, what their long con could be, and whether their goal is to save the teenage girl he’d seen or if they’ll see to it that the number of horizons she can access grows shorter and shorter because of them.

When the rest of the team comes back with food much later in the evening, Beverly fills him in on the outcome of de la Fuente’s interrogation. He confessed to all six murder charges as soon as Will left. Apparently his intention was to frame Hayes. The main five were easy victims to tie him back to, and Hayes would have been an easy patsy with how unlikely his connections to them were.

De la Fuente said he wasn’t expecting Hayes to be at Hirst’s apartment when he went in and ended up having to kill him in order to get to Hirst as he originally intended. When Will asks why he did it, Zeller tells him about a court case that happened a few years back that Judge Hayes presided over. De la Fuente’s best friend, so he called him, had been convicted of a crime he did not commit. Judge Hayes sentenced him to life in prison.

His friend, as it turns out, was one of Hayes Junior’s first attempts to help a former student who had fallen into unfavorable circumstances. It was how he and de la Fuente knew each other and it was how the latter picked his targets.

“That’s all it takes,” Lloyd says over his cheeseburger. “Cross the wrong person, and who knows who ends up paying for your mistake.”

“You say that like it’s Judge Hayes’ fault that his son was murdered,” Price retorts around his straw. “Who even knows if de la Fuente is telling the truth about his friend? Innocent people do end up in jail, but it wouldn’t have been Hayes’ fault if the jury decided to convict. He had to go off the evidence he was given.”

_He is telling the truth about his friend,_ Will doesn’t say, though it burns in him.

It would mean telling them about de la Fuente’s being patesi. It would mean telling them what he did for Will. He doesn’t want to have that conversation—doesn’t feel as if he’ll ever be ready to. There isn’t a tactful way to tell them that de la Fuente only did what he was compelled to do in this one term of his long, endless life. He will live more lives like this one that will be better or worse. He could even have come directly _from_ worse and find solace in the life he has now.

It’s all a matter of perspective, especially concerning beings given over to immortality.

They finish eating quietly. If anyone notices that Will doesn’t talk as much, they don’t point it out. He’s been actively withdrawing himself anyway, so they may simply be honoring his wish for privacy. He’s grateful, in any case. All he wants to do now is go home and see the dogs. After so long without being able to feel quite as much as he could before, he’s _too_ aware of his friends in the room with him—can feel all of their heartbeats and the subtle, intricate shifts in their trains of thought. He craved this stimulation when he was without it, but now it is too much.

They fly back to Virginia early in the morning. Zeller complains that it would have been nice to drive and Price counters by saying that the plane ride cuts three hours off their trip. They argue good-naturedly about bird migration patterns afterward. Will closes his eyes and sleeps until they land at Richmond International.

After he’s thoroughly tired himself out running with Winston and Penelope in the backyard for over an hour, he sits down and calls Dr. Lecter. He’s still in the process of catching his breath when Dr. Lecter answers and there’s an awkward moment where he gets embarrassed at how amusing Lecter finds his choppy explanation for the exertion lining his voice. 

In spite of pitfalls, they successfully schedule an appointment for tomorrow evening. Will is anxious for it to happen so he can talk to someone about the meeting with the patesi and what it means. He hasn’t wanted to go to Jack or his friends on the team…

He told them he would only give them that information when it was vital to cases. His personal interactions with de la Fuente and their brief discussion about Ose are irrelevant to the BAU.

For all that he bounces on his heels and fidgets with his hands, their appointment time does come. Will drives himself in Lloyd’s car and gets there five minutes early, using that time to assess the artwork in the hall leading up to Dr. Lecter’s office. They’re beautiful works, objectively speaking. Will finds most art lovely to look upon as beauty is merely a social construct.

His conception of the beautiful was never defined by anything but relativity—the pallor of a foggy hillside relative to the hopeless smog of abandoned factories relative to the crackling insomnia of metropolitan cities relative to the untouched flesh of a serene lake.

He often views art and nature as inherently similar things. People and animals can be catalogued on different tiers as far as beauty is concerned, but the animate Mother Nature and her inanimate counterpart—the sculpture, the painting, the wood carving, the sonnet—are just different scenes from one long, stretching landscape whose entire picture is scattered among many smaller canvases.

Will enjoys the art on Dr. Lecter’s walls like he enjoys anything else—deeply, with a mildly obsessive tint to his interest that allows the images to burn permanently into his mind. The earthy tones of this pastoral piece and the aquatic turquoise of that woman’s linens speak to him of an age cast in lignite, malachite tesserae, and jade mosaic. Any beauty that he sees, even as his eyes perceive beauty in accordance to nature, is beautiful relative to Tenochtitlan.

Perhaps his conception of beauty is just as biased and situational as any other person’s after all, for what is beauty to him if the black of Beverly’s hair doesn’t remind him of the jet in Tezcatlipoca’s mask? What is beauty to him if the way Winston and Penelope huddle together to sleep every once in a while doesn’t remind him of the totemic handle of a ceremonial knife?

His eyes move next to a painting of a nude woman overseen by a tiny cherubic angel that makes him laugh in surprise and deep amusement. He claps a hand over his mouth as if to push the sound back into his mouth, but it’s too late, of course. Dr. Lecter will have heard him and will come to retrieve him shortly if his previous patient has not already left. Will smiles ruefully at the painting with its darker color palette, lazily studying the woman at the center of it with her arms out in a gesture of protest. Her stance brings him back into a more somber mood, which is good because he can feel a presence moving behind him toward the door.

Except—

The presence is wrong, or…it’s right, but it’s shifted into something cruelly recognizable. Will doesn’t have time to run. He doesn’t have time to ask himself why he should _be_ the one to run. The door opens behind him, and de la Fuente’s prophecy as patesi floods back into his mind like a protective spell.

_The one called Ose will reveal himself to you. He must not know that you see him._

The first time they saw each other, Ose ran. The first time Will saw him as Hannibal Lecter, Ose forced Will to leave. He thought Ose fled, but now he sees that he never left. Will’s skin hums with it and there’s no way he can fool Ose if he couldn’t fool the two he saw in Delaware.

But de la Fuente spoke prophecy.

There must be hope.

Will smiles small when Dr. Lecter speaks his name with the lilt of a question. His insides feel poised to explode and his knees feel weak, but he keeps his mouth smiling and his thoughts mild and his head clear no matter how distantly his heart rate creeps steadily up and up. He turns to half-look at his doctor, not at _Ose_ because his face is hidden from his eyes. 

“Is this what people think angels look like?” he mumbles, a genuine, breathy laugh riding on the tail end of his inquiry. He addresses the painting again, pointing at the painting of the woman before turning to face Dr. Lecter. He feels faint. “I seem to recall having larger wings.”

Dr. Lecter looks uncertain for all of two seconds before he cracks a small smile.

“Early depictions of angels show beings with no wings at all.”

Will shrugs. “I suppose we only ever look the way we need to.”

Innocently, Dr. Lecter asks, “How do you mean?”

“If I had to fly, I could fly,” Will answers easily, keeping his hands relaxed at his sides even as an onslaught of lightheadedness drifts over him. “If I had to be among humans, then I was human.”

He walks into the office when Dr. Lecter waves him in with another small smile.

“And the protuberances the doctors in New Orleans found on your back?” Lecter asks curiously.

Will ambles distractedly around the office, not seeing or feeling much of anything outside of the slow agony of fear souring the air in his lungs. “Symbolic,” he murmurs. “When I had wings, I was like a bird.”

“I imagine if the Nahuatl could see you in flight, they would have believed you to be one of their gods,” Dr. Lecter—Ose, _Ose_ —says with an obvious smile in his voice that probably doesn’t translate on his face. “Did you ever feel as a god among them, when you lived in their time?”

The question is bait, but of what sort, Will can’t tell. He turns so his back faces the curtained window and watches Dr. Lecter where he stands several feet off near his desk. Strange that he doesn’t stand closer, as he has in the past. Not entirely so strange that Will wishes he would.

“Sometimes,” he cedes, not wanting to give away too much.

Confronting Ose now, as much as he wishes nothing more than to lunge for his throat, would be ill-advised. It would be against patesi counsel, and since it was the only message for him at the time, Will treats it as the word of God. It carries every bit as much weight. Going against it or even attempting to change the outcome of a predicted event could end in catastrophe. It had before to others, so he knows.

Ose knows, too. He’d told Will—he’d told Mal’ak—in Tenochtitlan that he had spoken with patesis, three of them, in all of his life. He wouldn’t say what they told him. Keeping it from Will amused him. Of course it did. Patesis are like royalty in their leagues. No one ever wanted to meet them, but having that privilege is still seen as a great honor when it happens.

Much like going to one’s death in ritual sacrifice was a great honor in Tenochtitlan.

If it was feasible, Will would ask right now what the hell it was they said to him—he would tell Ose that he’d finally met with one of the patesi for himself and that he’d been healed. Ose can tell he’s been healed, but Will wants to speak of it to someone anyway. He wants to breathe the words, _I met one, Ose. Did they speak to you of me as he spoke to me of you? Ose, tell me. We have time now. Just don’t run from me. I’m not going anywhere._

Therein lies the problem.

Dr. Bloom told Will he could leave his past behind him. She said he could live outside of Ose and that short period of his life forever defined by the spray of ancient rivers, blood, and the glossy surface of lifeless Pyrite eyes implanted into so many unseeing masks.

Will _is_ afraid of his destiny. He doesn’t want to let go of the past—of this person before him pretending to be someone else at who knows what cost to himself or to the real Hannibal Lecter.

He doesn’t want to be the one to destroy them both. For all his talk of damnation and for all his rage that is confusion and passion and anger entwined, what he wants is to sit with this being that truly knows him and to speak with him of the time they lost, of Ose’s deception with Hannibal Lecter, of how he hurt Kamael, of the words Ose spoke to him before he blacked out in Jack’s office.

_I have missed you, Akh._

Will had cried in front of him, had been in hysterics in his presence without knowing that the Dr. Lecter he knew had never been Lecter at all but Ose, had stood with Ose in front of Abel’s cage while all along Abel silently protested the offensive presence beside the one person who claimed to be his friend.

_Gods above._

When their session ends, Will has no idea what they’ve been talking about. He suspects they talked about de la Fuente, maybe, and possibly about their mutual concern for Abigail. Will may have mentioned Abel’s continued state of malaise. Lecter walks with him for the door—and it taxes Will not to call him Ose and not to call himself Mal’ak—and stops Will with a hand on his arm before he can walk slowly and casually toward the exit.

“I’m glad you’ve returned home safely, Will.”

Will chokes on his words, thoroughly disappointed when Ose doesn’t call him by his real name and unable to succinctly tell him as much without giving everything away entirely too soon—and now _would_ be too soon. He isn’t sure how he can tell, but it is. Perhaps he needs to wait, as he did in Tenochtitlan, for Ose to reveal himself willingly.

Maybe they will chase each other as they had in their younger days together. Will almost hopes that they will be afforded that luxury—that they will have this chance to explore what was interrupted before.

It had been his intention when he fell to make good on the final task he’d been given. But why?

It wouldn’t redeem him. It would only bring him misery that he has experienced once before. De la Fuente’s decree had not been for bloodshed. It had been for patience. He had made himself wait through blind, deserved purgatory and he had made himself a devil just like Ose with his attempt to murder the very man Ose wears now. He could wait now. He should be able to wait.

He can’t help but wonder if their cards have changed, or if the beings who decide fortune merely learned from watching their first life together that they were not beings to jump immediately into anything. They were and are, in fact, famous for running, but that was another life, and as Mal’ak—as Will—had come to realize so long ago, many years had surged up to create a gap between them.

He doesn’t know if Ose loves him or if he ever loved him. He doesn’t know his own heart. While he waits for Ose to choose him again, he will have to decide. Ose will have to decide, too. The fringes of the storm Jack anticipates to swallow them whole edges ever nearer. It hasn’t descended upon them yet, but when it does…

“Good night, Dr. Lecter.”

“Good night, Mal’ak.”

Will trips over his feet and looks back, likely wearing an incriminating expression on his face. Dr. Lecter just smiles, head tilted so slightly to one side. The gesture is different from Ose’s when he summoned the leopard to attack Will in Tenochtitlan. It carries softness to it—compassion. He realizes he’s staring when Dr. Lecter drops his eyes briefly.

“You mentioned that de la Fuente called you by name in Delaware. There was a light in your eyes when you said it.”

Will manages a jerky nod and pockets his hands, heart wrenching in his chest. His voice is strained when he says, “You get to miss hearing your name.”

“I imagine so.”

Will averts his gaze and clears his throat. “Same time next week, Doctor?”

“Yes.”

He nods and leaves without another word or glance in Lecter’s direction. He’s terrified that if he looks again he’ll catch sight of something he can’t plausibly deny and that his charade will be broken.

The drive home is quiet and difficult. He has to stop once when his vision blurs too much for him to be able to distinguish between lane lines in the asphalt. When he gets home, Lloyd is in the kitchen working on dinner. He excuses himself quickly so he can take the car to the grocery and buy the vegetables their meal is currently lacking.

Will stands rigidly in the kitchen for a few minutes after Lloyd leaves and offers his hand to Winston and Penelope when they come to greet him. They sense the distress rippling off of him, and their answering anxiety decides him on his next course of action.

He walks out to the back and toward the trees. The evening is dark and oppressive around him, even for the clear, open sky far above. Will walks and the dogs follow him from a safe but protective distance. When he stops in a shadowy clearing to scream until his lungs just about give out, they give him his space until he’s good and done.

Lloyd is in the kitchen serving their plates when he makes it back to the house. Will’s voice is rough and broken when he tells him how therapy went. The scratched gravel sound of his words evidently surprises Lloyd enough that he turns to point a wide-eyed look at him.

“Are you okay, Will?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

And while his tearful appearance and the stripped quality of his voice might beg to differ, he does feel fine. He only needs to be patient.

_You say that like I haven’t already given you time,_ he remembers himself saying in the language he and Ose once spoke together.

_You’ve been using it to run from me._

And Mal’ak had said, _One of us had to run._

It won’t be him this time. If Ose has to run from him first as he had in the beginning, then Will can wait. He has to wait. He sits down to eat with Lloyd, and they don’t speak of de la Fuente or Ose or Will’s mangled vocal cords. 

It’s nice. It isn’t real, but it’s nice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Arad – slave, servant (used to refer to the state of mind people are left in after demon possession)  
> Šenmeû – gods that constantly hear, listen (Will’s preferred substitute for dumu Aĝ / child of heaven)  
> Patesis were governors of ancient Sumer (in this story they’re basically immortal prophets)  
> Ezbu is an Akkadian word that denotes an abandoned child  
> Aḫḫāzu – demon   
> Ḫa-lam – (to be) bad, evil; to forsake, forget; to destroy (refers to the period of time immediately after an angel falls when he’s fair game for demons and the like)
> 
> The painting with the earth tones is based on Caspar David Friedrich’s _Woman in Front of the Setting Sun_ ; the turquoise linens painting is based on Edgar Degas’ _Woman in the Bath_ ; the last painting is based on Artemisia Gentileschi’s _Aurora_


	7. In My Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beverly learns a hard lesson about the supernatural side of the world.
> 
>  
> 
> OH MY GOD OKAY I AM SO SORRY IT'S BEEN LIKE SEVEN MONTHS SINCE I UPDATED THIS THING.
> 
> I had the first half of this chapter sitting in my documents just chilling for the longest time, and then today I was like, "Well, I should probably do that now."
> 
> This story _will_ be a completed work someday. Someday! -shakes fist-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Though I know I’ll never lose affection / For people and things that went before / I know I’ll often stop and think about them / In my life / I love you more_
> 
>  
> 
> “The great mother whom we call Inanna gave a gift to woman that is not known among men, and this is the secret of blood. The flow at the dark of the moon, the healing blood of the moon’s birth…for the knowledge that life comes from between our legs, and that life costs blood.”   
> \--Anita Diamant, _The Red Tent_
> 
> (This chapter includes blood and guts of the menstrual variety—AKA a period.)

She jolts awake with her arm barred across her stomach and a garbled groan on her lips. A hot lick of pain churns in her gut and her legs tense in an automatic attempt to diminish the ache. The bright green numbers on the clock read 3:17. Beverly trudges to the bathroom, already a bloody mess but a salvageable one. Menstruation is not something she missed at _all_ when she was on the pill.

This month is only her second off birth control, and she intensely wishes she had just stayed the course instead of deciding to go off it until she needed it again. Her doctor said it’d be like this: agony.

Not that she’s surprised. It’s just massively annoying. If she didn’t look at corpses for a living, the veritable disaster that is her shed endometrial lining might just startle her. Alas and alack, she’s also quite desensitized to this whole period business.

Still, incredibly, terribly irritating.

It’s been six months since she’s even been on a date and the last one six months ago did not end well. Barry was interesting, but she hadn’t been enthusiastic about a long distance relationship and he didn’t make himself out to be a one-night stand kind of guy. Outside of that experience there really hasn’t been anyone. Work keeps her busy, usually. She still thinks she’d be better off going back on the pill—less pain, less fuss, less wanting to jump out of a window.

On shaky legs, she goes out into the kitchen for something to take the edge off and sits wide awake at the table waiting for the water on the stove to boil. She pours the steaming water into a glass bottle, wraps it in a dish towel, and holds it over her lap until the cramps subside. When she doesn’t sense an imminent threat of crumpling to the floor in agony, she digs a bar of half-eaten dark chocolate out of the fridge and tears away the red fancy wrapper advertising dried cherries within.

Beverly searches for her tablet and does some idle research on the Akkadian and Old Babylonian words she’s heard Will utter on occasion. Some leads she explores fall under the dialectal category of Emesal. It’s strange to her that a good chunk of the vocabulary used to describe ancient beings and customs is derived primarily from Mesopotamia when surely there’s uncounted rules, tales, and figures from _all over_ that Will just hasn’t shared with them yet—if he even plans on sharing that wealth of culture with them. She gnaws on the hard block of dark chocolate flecked with bits of cherry and maps out the facts.

The short list of words she can remember off the tip of her tongue don’t even begin to scrape the surface of the world Will knew before the fall. There is an entire language already once-filtered through those that humans have used, translated once more into words that can be read in English: _heaven, father, child, abandonment, demon._

Her list stares back at her from the notepad she took off the counter, unimpressive and incomplete. There must be existing terminology to describe the humans who get swept up into this new but massively unchanged universe. She has a feeling Will won’t be enthused to speak of it if she asks him when she sees him again. He’s been tight-lipped since they came back from the serial killings in Wilmington.

Beverly lays her head down on the table and dozes off to wispy thoughts of the Hanging Gardens and whether Will had seen the place before its destruction—if he’d seen the Library of Alexandria or the Great Pyramid of Giza in its prime.

As for what she’s seen of him, Nahuatl is the plot of earth that has claimed his loyalty and his love. But she suspects it’s less about what the Aztecs showed him than it is what Ose showed him.

She snaps upright to the sound of breaking glass and looks down to see the hot water bottle cracked open on the floor. Beverly watches the water trickle between tiny shards and glittery clumps unable to contain her laughter. The cooled water spills out onto her fallen notepad and smears and blurs the ink.

She thinks she dreamt of an ancient lighthouse falling into the seaside and taking the universe down with it.

It’s her day off, so she does the natural thing and drives to Jack’s house at around noon. Beverly gets Bella at the door. She’s exactly who she wanted to see.

Bella is radiant as always, though there’s a hint of concerning pallor in her cheeks. Jack isn’t around—apparently he’s gone with Dr. Bloom to ask Abigail Hobbs one more time what happened with Nicholas Boyle.

The recent discovery of Boyle’s body indicates foul play and Abigail Hobbs is really the only lead Jack has. Bella expresses some dismay over the situation in general, much to Beverly’s surprise. She’s curious how she knows about Abigail beyond just the press coverage.

“I was there when she woke up,” she explains, waving for Beverly to sit down and then sitting down herself. “With Will. She asked to see me once—it was after they took her back to Minnesota.”

Beverly leans in, interested. “Oh, I didn’t know.”

“I think she was just overwhelmed. Everything that happened with her family and she’s _still_ not out of the woods.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Is this an interrogation, Beverly?” Bella asks in an unassuming, quietly amused tone that makes Beverly’s face go warm.

“No, of course not. I’m just…I’m curious, I guess. Jack doesn’t really have me on the case.”

“No?”

“Well, I’m working Boyle right now. Me and about six other people. But for right now Abigail Hobbs is his suspect, not mine.”

“You’re worried about her,” Bella prompts.

Beverly shrugs, not eager to answer in the affirmative but not liking the way the negative feels like a lie. Bella just gives her a knowing, sympathetic look like she gets it, completely. Maybe she does. Abrasive as Jack can be, he needs a ruthlessly compassionate person in his life.

“Are you sure I can’t get you something to drink?”

“No, thank you. I’m fine.”

Her host takes a moment, as if she’s turning over those words in her mind and checking for double meanings. She raises one eyebrow and asks, “Jack didn’t send you here to check up on me, did he?”

Confusion flickers through Beverly’s mind. It must show on her face.

“Oh,” Bella says softly.

“Why would he have sent me? Is everything okay?”

“That isn’t the word I would use, but for right now, everything is as it should be.”

That’s what she says, but she looks resigned to it instead of hopeful. The smudges beneath her eyes appear darker, more sinister. Beverly schools her expression into neutrality and squeezes her fingers together. Her heart pounds evenly in her throat and seems to be saying, _No._

With only the barest hint of sternness beneath the warmth, Bella says, “Don’t you get that look on your face.”

Beverly straightens, blinks the moisture from her eyes, and nods once. Bella looks back at her, mercifully gentle and unbreakable at the same time.

“Is there anything I can do?”

Her expression softens some at the waver in Beverly’s voice. She drops hers to a lower pitch, soothing: “Just don’t tell me you’re sorry.”

Beverly nods in response. It’s the only option that feels remotely safe. They sit quietly for a time while a clock in the next room ticks to remind them of every second sloughing off their lives into oblivion. The living room is very clean, Beverly notes. The house is warm.

“She asked me about Abel Gideon.”

_Strange,_ Beverly thinks.

She can’t imagine Will would have volunteered that name, but then she remembers Freddie Lounds’ interest in all things concerning Will Graham, and more recently, Abigail Hobbs. It’s not unthinkable that Lounds would slip that name along to Abigail in hopes of incriminating Will further than her father’s case file already does.

“Hard to explain someone like Abel Gideon,” Bella muses, interrupting Beverly’s train of thought. “Hard to explain just one part of him without explaining the rest.”

Beverly smiles ruefully. “I’m getting used to hearing that.”

“Couldn’t have been too difficult. Work must be like that all the time for you. Seems like it is for Jack anyway.”

“I don’t normally explain what I do for the FBI,” Beverly admits. “To coworkers, no explanation’s needed. It’s just what we do. It’s evidence. Outside of that, it’d be conjecture, and that’s not what I get paid to do.”

Bella’s lips part around a wide smile, and for a long moment, Beverly is completely disarmed. It’s not often people really look at her like that—as if they’re seeing some intensely integral aspect of her character without finding it grotesque or overwhelming.

She works predominantly in violent murders, so she tends not to take it personally. People tend to keep their distance when they discover that she’s not squeamish about decomposition or that she’s been elbows-deep in rotting flesh. It takes cruder stuff than the bad guys they chase are made of to bring just one of them to justice. She’s trained herself not to be disappointed when men are intimidated, when women are disgusted, when family members pretend to know but never could.

And Bella, maybe because Jack could never have been compatible with a different kind of person, does none of that. She doesn’t presume to know more or less about the work they do. Bella just treats her like a human being, plain and simple. Beverly’s only ever been around to see Bella interact with Will once, but she’s the same way with him.

Former _Destroyer Angel_ or no, Bella doesn’t handle Will like he’s fragile or too precious to touch. She’s just aware, all the time, of the very real fact that he could break, just like anyone in his position could break. Bella is her own kind of angel, of the human variety.

“Are you doing okay?” Bella asks, bringing Beverly out of her thoughts.

“Oh. Yeah, I’m all right. I just…wanted to come see you.”

“Really? Well, here I am.”

Beverly smiles and sits when Bella offers her a seat in the living room. They have tea and coffee, and Bella gives the skinny on what she’s been up to. When prompted, she explains her encounter with Abigail Hobbs more in depth and asks if Beverly knows what Freddie Lounds’ intentions toward Abigail are, if she can be trusted, and so on.

It must be maternal instincts kicking in or maybe just good old fashioned empathy, but Beverly gets the sense Bella’s really concerned about Abigail. They discuss her a while longer without venturing into forensics, which is for the best.

A call comes in on Beverly’s phone. She’s surprised to see that it’s Alana and excuses herself to answer it.

“Dr. Bloom?”

“Beverly, I have a favor to ask. Are you busy?”

“No, I’m off today. What do you need?”

“Gideon’s due to be in court tomorrow. We need someone to touch base with him before he’s transferred, but Jack has Will on Boyle and I can’t leave Abigail alone. Would you go see him? He may even have a better reaction to meeting someone new.”

“You haven’t been getting positive reactions out of him?”

“No, it’s almost like he’s a completely different person. 

“There’s a word for that, you know.”

Alana sighs. “If he _is_ possessed, it’ll be in his and our best interest to confirm an identity.”

Beverly starts to smile at Alana’s resigned tone. It wasn’t that long ago that Beverly had had to convince her that such things exist. Now here they are casually discussing possession.

“I’ll stop by and see if I can find anything out.”

“Thanks, Beverly.”

“You called this a favor?” she asks, already getting her keys out of her pocket.

Readily enough, Alana says, “Yes.”

“Drinks?”

Alana chuckles, a soft sound. “Sure.”

Bella finds Beverly in the hallway and gives her a knowing look. She says, “Work, right?”

“Yeah, sorry.”

“Come by the next time you have a day off.” Bella shrugs. “It’s nice to see you when you’re not on the clock.”

“I’ll come back.” Beverly smiles. “Thank you for the coffee, Bella.”

“Be safe, Beverly.”

Chilton’s hospital is something like an hour away. She keeps the windows down so that the breeze stays on her face and makes good time. Gas isn’t cheap at the moment, but she’s getting drinks out of it eventually so it’s an even trade. She’s been looking for a reason to just talk to Dr. Bloom for a while now, and short of taking her out to the shooting range, she hasn’t been sure how to casually ask.

So go figure it would happen this way with Beverly going to question Abel Gideon as a favor. The gun range sounds like a slightly better idea.

Matthew Brown receives her at the front desk. Apparently Dr. Bloom called ahead and let him know she’d be coming. Chilton’s nowhere to be seen and Brown doesn’t kick up any fuss over her being here.

“You caught him at a good time. He’s got court tomorrow morning,” Matthew reads off the monitor on the front desk. “If you’d come tomorrow, you would’ve missed him.”

Beverly thanks him and doesn’t bother to explain that that’s exactly why she was sent to see Gideon now of all times. She walks on alone with a visitor’s badge through the corridor to Gideon’s cell where he’s lying flat on his cot. She calls his name as she comes to a stop at the bars that separate them.

“Not another _psychiatrist_ ,” he mutters, rolling onto his side and looking up at her. “Oh.”

“My name is Beverly Katz.”

“Yes, we haven’t met before, have we? Good to finally put a name to the face.”

She doesn’t say ‘likewise’. Fallen angel or no, he murdered his wife and her entire family on Thanksgiving. Will is really overdue for an earful on his bad luck with the supernatural entities he decides to keep for friends.

“Word is you’ve got a hearing tomorrow.”

“Correct,” Gideon croons, standing fluidly to his feet. He approaches the bars and loops his hands through to hold on. “I’ll likely rot for what I did to the Vitalis family, but the tragic Mary Trevor who was brutally murdered on these grounds? She was the product of an entirely different influence. Intellectual property of which I reject all ownership.”

“I’m not sure that’s how it works,” Beverly says slowly.

Brightly, he answers, “Oh, certainly, it isn’t. But that doesn’t mean I can’t throw Frederick under the bus for what he’s caused me to do. He won’t be punished, of course he won’t. Seeing him squirm under my thumb in court, though. That, Ms. Katz, is a reward all on its own.”

Gideon has the makings of a sneer on his face that Beverly is infinitely curious about. She doesn’t have the words to form the right question, not the one she wants—not in a way that Chilton will hear and dismiss as inconsequential. Gideon’s expression twitches slightly and his eyes leave her face for a few seconds before returning to meet her gaze.

“Was there a reason you came to see me today, Agent?”

She can’t tell him the real reason, but attempting to pull a lie to the surface has her coming up empty. Gideon looks annoyingly entertained.

“And how is Will Graham? He hasn’t been to visit in a while.”

“You haven’t welcomed his presence the last few times he made the trip.”

“Well, yes, relationships fracture. People fall apart.” His eyes flick just to her left again, right over her shoulder. She turns to see what he could be looking at, but there’s nothing there. It gives her a strange uneasy feeling, worsened by the dark glint in his eye when she faces him. “Boundaries are crossed.”

“Did you cross a line, or did he?”

“It was neither of us, actually.” He leans in and squints at her almost playfully. “You know.”

She does know.

“If you see him today, will you tell him I’m sorry?”

“I need you to be more specific than that if you want me to pass on messages.”

Gideon cracks a smile, calmly unruffled by her crossed arms and stern tone.

“For Mary Trevor,” Gideon replies just as evenly, pressing his forehead gently to the bars to peer at her more closely. His eyes look incongruously bright as if there might be tears in them. “It was…overzealous…of me.”

“You said it wasn’t your idea.”

“It wasn’t,” Gideon whispers, smile stretching slowly across his mouth. “It was mine.”

The precise work of a copycat, the surgical precision of a practiced hand, and the use of Wound Man as a signature and allusion: a hint—it was _his_.

Beverly steps back and Gideon shudders and the doors from the atrium slam open. Chilton doesn’t run in, but he announces that their visitation is over and that it’s time for Beverly to leave. She steals a parting glance at Gideon before Matthew apologetically waves for her to go with him.

Gideon’s eyes are glazed and unseeing. His knuckles are pinched white around the iron bars.

“That wasn’t the first time that’s happened to him.” Beverly whispers at Matthew once she’s managed to drag him out the front doors and down the steps that lead up to the building. The routine of it and Chilton’s practiced reaction to the situation tell her it’s a normal occurrence. “Have you gotten a name?”

“No. The thing is attached to him or something. Every time we think it’s gone, it just comes back. It only talks in riddles.”

She takes a sharp breath in and out. A chill creeps under her skin and pushes the hairs on her arms to stand up. There’s no way Gideon can handle a trial in his condition, not if he’s jumped at an inopportune moment and made to dance like a puppet. He’s already killed a woman under the influence.

_An entirely different influence,_ he’d called it.

Gideon was out of his mind when he killed Mary Trevor, but not because Chilton tricked him into thinking he was the Chesapeake Ripper. If it’s Ose who’s got him now, then Ose made him think he was the Chesapeake Ripper.

The only question remaining is _why_ Ose chose the Chesapeake Ripper. As a nearly omniscient figure, he could probably convince anyone he was anything without any difficulty whatsoever. Ripper, though. He’s a bold choice, even for a demon famed for his ability to wreak insanity on humankind. Even more than that, Ripper is personal.

Hijacking Will's psychiatrist was personal. 

It could be a taunt at Will’s chosen vocation. Ose clearly knows which pies Will has his fingers in. It could be a power play and nothing more, but it nags at the edges of Beverly’s mind. What are the chances, really, that the elusive serial killer they’ve been hunting is a demonic entity?

And what would that say about their chances of ever catching him?

From Will’s own estimate, Ose has the ability to shed and assume identities at the drop of a hat, can alter memories, and erase any sign of his having ever existed. She wonders if Alana had sent her with Ose specifically in mind. She’ll have to tell Will. Even if her Ripper theory is impossible to prove, they need to consider the full force of what their opponent can bring to the table.

They also need to know what Will can do. Beverly can’t say she has any idea what he’s actually capable of. Some deep, primal instinct she has tells her it would inspire fear in the bravest of hearts.

“I have to tell my people. It’s time we do something to fix this.”

“Like what? An exorcism?” Matthew, typically unflappable, catches himself before yelling and makes a conscious effort to lower his voice. He continues, almost shyly, “The hospital’s not haunted. Even if we could find… _him_ , it’s not like we know the first thing about stopping him.”

“Don’t we?” she says more to herself than to Matthew.

Will’s entire self-proclaimed purpose for having lived a life on this plane is to exterminate the very beast kicking up a storm in their midst. There have to be rituals or ceremonies they can conduct to destroy an enemy the likes of Ose. Mal’ak ha-Mashḥit didn’t crash land in NOLA right where Jack had an active investigation going for all of this to end hopelessly out of their favor. He’s here with them now because he’s the answer.

How much Matthew dreads hearing her say as much is written all over his face. He looks away and then down, covers his mouth, and murmurs that he has to get back inside. Beverly goes to her car and calls Dr. Bloom leaned up against the side of her car.

“I spoke to Gideon.”

“What do you think?”

“It’s like we thought. We shouldn’t get into it over the phone. I can stay here and meet you at Port Haven, but I need to go back to Quantico at some point and read Jack in.”

“I’ve gotta take Abigail back to Baltimore. I’ll be an hour if you don’t mind waiting.”

Beverly does wait. She goes directly to Port Haven and scans the books on the shelves in the reception area, trying to get thoughts of Ose and Gideon out of her head. Alana brings Abigail in through the front entrance. Abigail looks ashen and like she might be sick. Beverly stands and Abigail notices her. It’s not obvious whether she recognizes Beverly.

“Dr. Bloom.”

“Oh. Beverly.”

“I can head up by myself,” Abigail says in a small voice. She turns to face Alana. “I just wanna lie down.”

“I’ll see you for our regular session on Thursday, okay?”

“All right.”

Abigail gives Beverly a polite nod but doesn’t say anything more as she makes a beeline for the stairs. A staff member covertly follows suit with Alana’s permission. She supposes that’s the safest thing for everyone, considering the sheer number of ways any one thing can go wrong nowadays.

“We can talk in my office.”

Alana looks tired as hell but she’s putting on a tough face that Beverly can definitely appreciate. She’s hesitant to ask how it went with Abigail. Jack will tell her anyway.

“Can I get you anything?” Alana asks once they’re cloistered away in her swanky office where she must talk with patients.

Beverly waves her hand. “No thank you.”

She sits when Alana does and gives her host a few moments to recalibrate.

“What did you find out?”

“Well, I can’t be sure of anything, but I’m pretty sure Ose’s setting up shop in Gideon’s head. From the looks of things, he’s been there a while.”

“Will thought as much.” Alana nods and presses her hand to her mouth. She sits for a good handful of seconds in contemplative silence that Beverly doesn’t dare interrupt. “He was torn between Ose and Barbas. The jury’s out on whether it’s affecting Chilton to the extent that it has Gideon.”

“Or Matthew.”

Alana looks at her. “Do you think so?”

“Hell, it could have been in any of us and we’d be none the wiser. Chilton was some kind of special case and even he barely knows who had him by the reins.”

“This is a mess.”

“One might say, biblical.”

Alana sighs. “I wish I knew what to do to make it stop.”

“I had some ideas about that.”

“Will? Or Mal’ak ha-mashḥit?”

“I was thinking Mal’ak. I know he’s been…withdrawn lately, ever since he woke up from the coma, but…he has to know something. It’s not enough to co-exist anymore. We need a proper solution before more people get hurt.”

They let that threat linger between them, clouding the air. Alana laces her fingers together over her desk.

“I’m starting to wonder how much violence in today’s world is part of a necessary evil—if it could be part of a cleansing for this greater realm of entities that we can’t touch.”

“Bullshit,” Beverly says on reflex. “If it can touch us, we can touch it. We just need to figure out how.”

“Do you think _Will_ knows how?”

“He has to.”

“But think about that, Beverly. If he knows, why hasn’t he done anything?” The question coming out of Alana’s mouth is slow and wondering, not accusatory, not yet. “And if he doesn’t know, why was he sent in the first place?” She sits up in her chair. “Do you think it was a suicide mission, the first time?”

Beverly pauses with words on the tip of her tongue. Mal’ak had been sent down to deal with Ose in particular.

“I don’t think it was. I think he was meant to survive, and Ose, too.” Beverly leans forward in her chair on the other side of Alana’s desk and rubs her hands together. “I think they were both meant to be here, right now.”

“Why?”

“Because of the Ripper.”

Heavy silence permeates the room. Alana presses her hands to her forehead and closes her eyes. Beverly stands and waits until Alana looks at her.

“I need to tell Jack what I found. You don’t have to get up. I’ll see myself out.”

“Drinks this weekend?” Alana offers a bit weakly, albeit smiling.

Beverly smiles, too. Some light in the darkness then, thank God.

“Yeah, you know how to reach me.”

She heads back out the way she came, having to backtrack through one tricky hallway to get back to the reception area by the front entrance. She runs into Freddie Lounds on her way out and stops on the sidewalk when Lounds lopes after her to ask her questions about Will and Abigail and Jack.

“I think you know I can’t talk about an ongoing investigation.”

“Can’t you, Ms. Katz?” Lounds smiles and looks like a lion waiting for a meal. “Most of what I’ve been able to find out about Will Graham, I learned from members of your team.”

“You always were resourceful, Ms. Lounds.” Beverly smiles, hoping it looks even a little like the one Lounds pointed at her. “I can only imagine the kind of work you’d do as an officer of the law.”

She genuinely doesn’t mean for there to be barbs in that statement, but Lounds’ face does close off a tiny bit hearing it. Beverly leaves unimpeded and unscathed. She calls Jack from the inside of her car.

“Dr. Bloom asked me to meet with Gideon.”

“Oh? How did that go?”

“Like you’d expect. I’ve thought of a possible development in the Ripper case,” she starts slowly, hearing his slow intake of breath as he braces himself. “You’re not gonna like it, Jack.”

He sighs, already prepared for the worst, and says, “Are you still in Baltimore?”

“Yeah, I planned on heading down to Quantico if you needed me.”

“That would be for the best.”

“I hear that.” She hesitates, remembering Bella’s unnamed illness. It’s right there with the churning worry in her gut that some harm will come to Will because of whatever is happening with Gideon right now. “How did it go with Abigail Hobbs?”

“She did her dance. Dr. Bloom isn’t very happy with me, but I’m still not sold one way or the other.”

“Showing a teenage girl the dead body of a kid who attacked her in her home will do that.”

“Is that glibness I hear?”

“Is it?” She starts the car. “I’m on my way, Jack. I’ll tell you what I think about all this when I get there.”

Price and Bowman are comparing notes on an older Ripper case they worked when she gets into the BAU. She looks around but doesn’t find Jack in his office. When she circles back to them, they tell her he’s still in the morgue going over a few things. She finds Jack there with Zeller and Will looking over the single stab wound in the victim’s abdomen.

Zeller is gesticulating while explaining the angle and what it says about the attacker’s height. Will looks on with a crease between his eyebrows like he’s somewhere else.

“So she could have done it?” Jack turns at the sound of Beverly’s approaching footsteps.

“I mean, it’d be an easier estimation if the strike had come from overhead. This could be a lot of things with the close proximity of an underhanded strike.”

“What do you think, Will?” Jack asks him.

He just shakes his head distantly, brows furrowed and lips in a tight, thin line.

“We’ll call it for now. Zeller, have some people go through the autopsy report a dozen more times until they see something we don’t. There’s a misstep here. We just can’t make heads or tails of it yet.”

Zeller nods, slaps his hand on Will’s shoulder, and sets off for his task with a wave for Beverly as he passes. Will continues staring at the body on the table.

“Maybe we should go to your office?” Beverly suggests.

Jack spares a look for Will and asks him if he’s okay to stay behind while they talk. Will gives a noncommittal response but stays rooted where he is. His hands ball up into fists at his sides. Beverly watches him a while until they’re in the hall and walking toward Jack’s office.

“Is he okay?”

“He says he is.”

“Yeah,” Beverly says, “but _is_ he?”

“Honestly? I think he’s burnt out. He’s going through something, but God only knows what.”

Beverly ducks her head and raises her chin once she feels like she can. “I went to see Bella today, Jack.”

The sure rhythm of Jack’s stride stutters. He keeps walking, and Beverly keeps pace with him.

“I’m here if you need me—either of you. We’re all here.”

“I know you are.” They get to Jack’s office before he makes any kind of attempt to speak again. “Now about the Ripper.”

She gives him the rundown. He frowns a lot like he can’t stand the thought of more supernatural entities encroaching in his sandbox, but he never shrugs off the theory as implausible. In fact, he accepts it almost too readily.

“You seem a lot more level-headed about this than I thought you’d be,” she tells him, not trusting how easy it was to convince him.

“It explains why he’s made no progress with the case,” Jack says, so blasé about it that Beverly’s confused about what Jack really means. He elucidates when he sees the look on her face that must be every bit as confused as she feels. “He’s holding back.”

“What?”

“He’s known Ripper was Ose. Why else would he have _let_ him hijack his head that day when Dr. Lecter was here? Why else would Gideon and Dr. Lecter have been targeted? Ose’s playing with Will, testing to see how much he can get away with before Will steps up to the plate and hits back.”

“I’m not sure this is a good thing if you’re right.”

“There are no good options left, Beverly. We ran out a long time ago, long before Will even dropped down.”

There’s no talking to Jack when he has an idea in his head about the truth of a thing. She supposes he has that in common with a lot of people—Will, for one, but also Ose. It wouldn’t change his mind about anything if she brought up Alana’s two cents about it either, so Beverly keeps it to herself.

Back in the morgue, Jack tries to speak to Will. He’s stepped away from Boyle’s body on the autopsy table, but he’s still more or less removed from the situation. He blinks at Jack’s stone-faced delivery of their theory regarding Ose being the Ripper.

“Well? Did you know?”

“I suspected,” Will offers blandly. “I couldn’t have proven anything. I still can’t.”

“Why don’t I believe you, Will?” Jack puts his hands on his hips. “I don’t believe a word you just said. You _suspected_? Your friend was possessed and replicated a high-profile murder from a serial killer I’ve been trying to catch for years.”

“A serial killer _you’ve_ been trying to catch,” Will echoes, voice still toneless but making Beverly’s ears ring all the same.

“Careful. You’ve been hunting him longer than me.” Jack pauses and crosses his arms over his chest. “Or have you?”

Will looks between the two of them and lingers on Beverly, obviously waiting for her to say something. When she doesn’t, a tiny scoff passes his lips. “It was your idea.”

“If you’d seen Gideon, you wouldn’t have hesitated to jump to the same conclusion. Don’t you care anymore what happens to him?”

“He decided a long time ago that this would be his fate,” Will says, sounding ruthless but looking for just a second like he might break down any moment. He tilts his head at her and his voice takes on a strange tone she’s never heard him use before. “‘Fallen angel or no, he murdered his wife and her entire family on Thanksgiving.’”

It’s cruelty. Read back to her in her own words.

“Will—”

“I’m going home. Unless you need me for something else.”

_Unless you need to **use me** for something else_ , she can almost hear him tack on at the end.

She can’t even move. Jack doesn’t seem to know what to say either. Will tosses the gloves he’d been wearing and quietly leaves the room.

“What the hell was that?”

Jack sighs. “I don’t know anymore.”

“You don’t think he was…?”

“Possessed?” Jack shakes his head, looking weary and not at all angry. “No, I think that was him. He’s been carrying a chip on his shoulder for a while now. Might even have done him some good to get it off his chest.”

“What chip on his shoulder?”

“I don’t know, Beverly. Humanity? Mortality? Maybe he’s only just starting to realize that he made the biggest mistake of his life in Tenochtitlan.”

“How do you figure that?” she asks, playing devil’s advocate.

“Look around you. It’s come back to haunt us all.”

_You can’t know that it was his fault,_ she tries to say but can’t.

Jack can’t know it was Will’s fault just like she can’t know it wasn’t. For all they know, Will tried to run with Ose right at the end. Maybe he did, before he was taken away by God or whoever.

It doesn’t matter. The morning of Gideon’s court hearing, there’s a distress signal from his transport vehicle.

He doesn’t get far before they corner him on the road. Will is there when he pulls a gun and is subsequently gunned down by police. It happens and Beverly almost feels like she’s removed from it entirely—not in a way that she’s not in control of herself, but in the sense that she can’t believe it’s come to this.

She watches the look on Will’s face when the first of the bullets hit. The blood drains from his face, but his eyes track up and up, skyward.

His expression of horror melts into dread and utter despondency. She isn’t fast enough to stop him from running to Gideon as shots are still being fired. Jack calls for them to stop. Will pays the gun by Gideon’s head no mind and falls to his knees beside him. He pulls Gideon to him like he’s trying to absorb the wounds into his own body and sobs when he can’t.

She hears him say, “No. No, no, no, no. Kamael, please, no. No, God, no.”

And then he screams like an animal in the throes of death. Gideon dies in the street cradled in Will’s arms. Sirens bay in the far distance, too little much too late.

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter titles and lyrics by Johnny Cash.


End file.
